University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Lampeter Campus

Deadline: 9 July 2012

As part of the University’s investment into the Humanities and in response to growing demand for Anthropology and Heritage related studies, at both UG and PG level, the University wishes to appoint a fulltime permanent Social/ Cultural Anthropologist with a particular interest in Heritage or Heritage representations. The post holder will join a thriving and dynamic School of Archaeology, History and Anthropology, with a strong tradition in both research, teaching and project work.

For more information, see: http://www.trinitysaintdavid.ac.uk/en/humanresources/employmentopportunities/ 

Anthropology of Museums / Anthropology in Museums

MEG at the RAI conference ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE WORLD

The British Museum

8-10 June 2012

by Catherine Moore

The MEG Stall, with Claire Wintle and Mark Elliott

Thanks to the questioning minds of Clare Wintle and Chris Wingfield, as well as a grant from Arts Council England (ACE), MEG played a prominent role in the recent RAI conference ‘Anthropology in the World’, held at the British Museum earlier this month.

Eight MEG members were supported by ACE to attend the conference, but funds also allowed MEG to host a roundtable panel discussion session at the conference on ‘Anthropology in Museums/ Anthropology of museum’. The  members in attendance meant that there was no shortage of friendly faces at the MEG stall - situated in a prime spot just next to the Waterstones books, Berghahn publishers, but most importantly next to the tea and coffee. This allowed us to showcase our new and improved journal cover, leaflets and pop-up banners - all results of a previous phase of Subject Specialist Network (SSN) funding.

Coffee in and around the MEG Stall

MEG Chair Chantal Knowles began the discussion of 'Anthropology in Museums/Anthropology of Museums' with an overview of the historical and contemporary roles played by anthropology and anthropologists at the National Museums of Scotland. What emerged was a shifting landscape where the fortunes of both the ethnographic collections and those who interpret them have been found at the both the centre and the periphery at various times. Sharon Macdonald (University of Manchester) then admitted that she wasn’t an anthropologist in the museum, but one of those doing anthropology about museums, including supervising students who are exploring the role of the cleaners at Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow. Picking up this strand and extending it through the methodologies of visual anthropology, Elizabeth Edwards (DMU) discussed studies against the grain of the archive, in this case examining a supporting actor in museum displays – the photograph. Claire Warrior described the role of the anthropologist in a museum that is not overtly anthropological, showing through one object what anthropology can bring to the re-interpretation of collections at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Paul Basu (UCL) focused on the ‘affordances’ the museum might offer anthropology as a means of expressing anthropological knowledge in non-textual ways – through juxtaposition, the three dimensional, the affective and art. It then fell to Chris Wingfield to summarise the papers and throw things forward to the debate after lunch. Chris asked whether perhaps Museum Anthropologists might have something of a 'Melanesian' approach to museum artefacts (including exhibitions), being as interested in understanding them through their effects, as by situating them in relation to the context from which they notionally come?

The MEG hosted panel 'Anthropology in Museums / Anthropology of Museums'

The panel reconvened after lunch, when some great questions led to a dynamic exchange of ideas. Was the term ethnography still relevant in museums today, specifically as a category by which to define objects? Could art provide a space to say the things that more conventional displays could not? Can museums really fulfill the new demand for ‘impact’ in academic anthropological research? And should we be using exhibitions to experiment and provoke?  

PhotoCLEC website launch

Photographs are probably the most ubiquitous and far-reaching records of the colonial past. They trace the experiences of a vast range of people touched by European colonial expansion and domination, both colonised and colonisers.

How is this record understood in public histories?

What is its role in the way contemporary European cultures configure their pasts for the benefit of their futures?

This website explores the different ways in which photographs of the colonial past have been used by museums, as spaces of public history, to communicate and interpret the colonial past in a postcolonial and multicultural Europe.

Intended for curators, heritage managers, teachers an students, this resources has been built in response to the concerns of curators, debates about difficult histories in museums, the role of photographs in the museum space, and especially, key questions about the representation of the colonial past in museums as vectors of public history.

The resource offers a unique comparative character that is the result of a collaborative research project, funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area), in the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Norway, all of which have very different colonial histories and postcolonial engagements.

See: http://photoclec.dmu.ac.uk

MEG at the RAI Anthropology in the World event: Funded Places for MEG Members

The Museum Ethnographers Group has recently been awarded funding from Arts Council England as a Subject Specialist Network.

One element of this has been used to support MEG's participation in the RAI's Anthropology in the World conference at the British Museum, on 8-10 June.

As well as the MEG panel, Anthropology in museum / Anthropology of museums, MEG will be displaying its new publicity materials at a stall throughout the conference, manned, we hope, by our members.

If you are a MEG member who has already registered for the conference, and would be prepared to help out on the stall, please let us know by email.

However, with support from ACE and the RAI, we are also able to make 8 free spaces available at the conference for MEG members, 4 of these are reserved for Concessionary members.

If you would like to attend the conference, and are prepared to put in some time on the stall, all you need to do is send a brief email outlining 3 reasons why you should get a free place, and the times when you would not be available to man the MEG stall (the conference sessions and timetable are available online).

Deadline is 18 May, 2012

Email: members@museumethnographersgroup.org.uk

Kew's collections online

Apparatus for making & taking Niopo snuff, collected Cataracts of Maypures, Venezuela, by Richard Spruce, c. 1850

The Economic Botany Collection at Kew Gardens opened in 1847 with the aim of showing uses of plants around the world. Its 85,000 specimens include both raw materials and ethnographic artefacts. In April 2012 the collection database was placed online at: http://apps.kew.org/ecbot/search

The main search box covers all text in the database and works well for botanical names, collector surnames, and countries. The advanced search box allows more powerful searches using standardised terms for geography, use and plant part. In general, ethnic groups are not consistently mentioned by name, and are best searched for by geography.

For free-text fields, including collector/donor name, data cleaning is in progress; no attempt has been made to  proof-read all the notes, which include original spellings transcribed in the 1980s from object documentation. About 2000 specimens have photographs online.

Most specimens have extensive documentation, held in Kew's Archives, now partly digitised (http://plants.jstor.org/search?t=2021) and catalogued (http://www.calmview.eu/kew/calmview/).

Please do browse your interests on the database, and feel free to contact Mark Nesbitt, Curator, Economic Botany with any queries.

CfP: Museum Worlds

Museum Worlds: Advances in Research is a new, multi-disciplinary, refereed, annual journal from Berghahn Press that will publish work that significantly advances knowledge of global trends, case studies, and theory relevant to museum practice and scholarship around the world. 

For consideration in the first, 2013, issue, papers should be submitted to the Chief Editors Sandra Dudley and Kylie Message by the end of July 2012.

For more information, see: http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/air-mw/

Exhibition: TALA! - Visions of Angola

Powell-Cotton Museum, Quex Park, Birchington, Kent

TALA! (‘come and see’) - Visions of Angola, is a very special exhibition for 2012 made possible through the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund.  It presents previously unseen artefacts, photographs and film footage drawn from the rich wealth of materials brought back from Angola in the 1930's by Diana and Antoinette Powell-Cotton, the two pioneering daughters of Major Percy Powell-Cotton.

The exhibition curators spent a year of working closely with the Angolan diaspora in the UK, including community groups and official institutions to create this multi-media display of carefully selected historical and contemporary objects as well as film footage that reflects and celebrates some very personal histories including that of the two sisters whose vision is only now being realised. The individual stories that motivate many of the selections have also been recorded and will be available via audio handsets alongside display cases, giving the objects a new voice, representing continuity, change and an evolving Angola. 

Commenting on the exhibition, the curators said:  “The objects we had access to, were made by somebody’s great grandmother or great grandfather. They deserve to be seen and remembered by their rightful ancestors as well as the wider public. Just as importantly, the Angolan community here in the UK have a right to be involved in the decisions made about the collection. This is after all their history.” This unique and collaborative form of curation has innovatively mixed old and new to provide a fresh view of Angola and the collection. 

See: http://www.quexmuseum.org/home/copy-of-museum.aspx