Job Opportunity: Postdoctoral Researcher: The Restitution of Knowledge - artefacts as archives in the (post)colonial museum, 1850- 1939 Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

Applications are invited for the position of Postdoctoral Researcher on the project The Restitution of Knowledge: artefacts as archives in the (post)colonial museum, 1850- 1939, based at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, and led by Professor Dan Hicks (Oxford) and Professor Bénédicte Savoy (Technische University, Berlin). The position is funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), and is a fixed-term position for 30 months, running from 1 August 2020 to 31 January 2023. 'The Restitution of Knowledge' is a major new transnational UK-German collaboration combining historical and curatorial approaches to understand the status of collections from the continent of Africa in European museums as colonial legacies. The project seeks to intervene in current dialogues about restitution by generating and sharing of knowledge about the ongoing histories of colonial loot. The project combines digital scholarship, provenance studies, and military history to expand public understanding and debate around incidents of colonial plunder, joining the dots between museum collections and these violent histories. The Restitution of Knowledge thus revaluates the status of anthropological museums as places filled not just with objects but also with historical knowledge of conflict, violence and loss. It explores how Europe's “world culture” museums might be reframed as places of cultural memory, at which research can start to support restitution processes, from remembrance and the sharing of knowledge to the physical return of property. The successful candidate will hold a PhD in anthropology, history, archaeology or another relevant discipline, completed before 1 July 2020. The post will start on 1 August 2020, or as soon as possible thereafter.  The closing date for applications is 12.00 midday on Thursday 11 June 2020. Interviews are likely to take place week beginning 15 June 2020. Applications are particularly welcome from black and minority ethnic candidates, who are under-represented in academic posts at the University of Oxford. Please visit the University of Oxford website for more details.

AHRC PhD studentship: Biocultural knowledge, power and poetics in South American featherwork

Birkbeck, University of London, and the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford are pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded Collaborative Doctoral Training grant from October 2020 to undertake research on South American objects made by Indigenous peoples out of feathers, of with feathers attached, in the Pitt River Museum’s collections. 

Exploring South American featherwork in the PRM collections, this interdisciplinary, practice-based doctoral project will seek to develop ways of telling histories of specific objects that shed light not only on the historical processes of collection in the field and the ‘lives’ of the objects in the museum, but also on contemporary debates on Indigenous cultural identity, sovereignty and heritage rights, as well as the dynamic relationships among Indigenous peoples, birds, and environments. The project aims to provide understanding of these feathered objects as historical biocultural objects, which afford ways of telling the histories in which biodiversity emerges.

This project will be jointly supervised by Professor Luciana Martins, Birkbeck and Dr Laura Van Broekhoven, Oxfordand the student will be expected to spend time at both Birkbeck and the Pitt Rivers Museum, as well as becoming part of the wider cohort of CDP funded students across the UK. 

We are looking for an excellent, highly promising and appropriately qualified student who will embrace the opportunity to bring together academic research in museum studies with experience and training in a leading British museum.

We want to encourage the widest range of potential students to study for a CDP doctoral training grant and are committed to welcoming students from different backgrounds to apply for our doctoral training grants.

In general, full doctoral training grants are available to students who are settled in the UK and have been ordinarily resident for a period of at least three years before the start of postgraduate studies. Fees-only awards are generally available to EU nationals resident in the EEA. International applicants are normally not eligible to apply for this doctoral training grant.

Hours: The doctoral training grant is available on either a full-time or part-time basis.

Closes: Friday 13 March 2020

Interviews will be held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, on 27 March 2020.

Further information

For further details on the studentship and how to apply please follow the link below.

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/research/research-bursaries-studentships-funding/ahrc-collaborative-doctoral-training-grant

Event: Ethnographic Museums and the shapes of radical hope and reconciliation

Ethnographic Museums and the shapes of radical hope and reconciliation
 Saturday July 13, 17.30-19.00, 
Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre 

This public event brings global leaders in ethnographic museums together to consider how to reinvigorate museums with ethnographic collections, foreground indigenous knowledges and curatorial practices, and rethink assumptions about museums.

Participants include: João Pacheco de Oliveira (Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil); Joe Horse Capture (Minnesota Historical Society, USA); Damion Thomas (National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian Institution, USA); Wayne Modest (Museum of World Cultures, The Netherlands).

Entry is via the South Door, Robinson Close, South Parks Road, Oxford. Register for this free event at: https://bit.ly/2ZQDBsk

MEG event: Trip to Intrepid Women

Zena McGreevey discusses Beatrice Blackwood

The most recent MEG event was a visit to Intrepid Women: Fieldwork in Action,1910-1957 an
exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.   The exhibition was curated by Joanna Cole, Zena McGreevy and Julia Nicholson and we were very lucky to be given a tour of the exhibition by Zena and Julia and to have the chance to talk with all three of them over lunch.    

 

 

The exhibition focussed on six women who all contributed significant collections to the Pitt Rivers museum.   Each women had her own section which featured a mixture of photography, film footage and archival material alongside objects from the collection.  The exhibition was arranged chronologically but it was possible to approach the exhibition from either end or to pick and choose which individuals to focus on as each profile works as a standalone exhibit.

 

The first woman featured was Barbara Freire-Marreco one of three people to enrol on the Oxford Anthropology Diploma when it was founded in 1906 and the only one to be awarded a Distinction.  It was particularly good to hear about Makereti a woman from New Zealand with a Maori mother and an English father.  She worked as a tour guide and ambassador for Maori culture around Rotorua before marrying an English man and moving to Oxford.  Her collection is mainly made up of her own possessions which she bought with her to the UK. The third women is perhaps the best known of all of them, Beatrice Blackwood.  During the 1920s she undertook fieldwork in Canada, USA (including spending time in the same Pueblo communities as Freire-Marreco) and New Guinea before beginning work at the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1935.  

 

Julia Nicholson and MEG members

Highlights from Elsie McDougall’s collection of textiles from Mexico and Guatemala were beautifully displayed alongside drawings and diagrams of the techniques used and photographs of the weavers.  These textiles contrasted nicely with those collected by Ursula Graham in the Naga Hills.  Graham’s collection included a wide variety of object types with photography and some early colour films.  Neither of these women considered themselves anthropologists but nonetheless there collections and diligent records have made important contributions to the field.  The exhibition ends with film footage made by Audrey Butt Colson while she was doing fieldwork in the Upper Mazaruni District of Guyana in the 1950s.  The film was intended as a teaching tool but her work continues to be used by Akawaio people to support their claim for legal ownership of their ancestral lands.

 

It was particularly good to attend the exhibition as part of a MEG event as it gave us a chance to talk in detail with the curators and understand some of the issues they faced putting on the exhibition.  These included practical considerations like the accessibility of some of the collections and how they worked as a team as well as intellectual and ethical issues.  For example, Zena emphasised the importance of the manuscripts and archives in the collection that relate to the women and the meticulousness of their record keeping.  We debated over lunch whether these women had been overlooked because they did not come up with any grand overarching theories and whether this should now be regarded as a strength of their work as their extensive notes on a wide range of subjects, and not in support of a particular view, make them more useful to contemporary researchers.  Julia discussed the ethics of choosing objects for use in marketing and the decision not to use spiritual objects in this way.   I was particularly keen to hear about all the women who didn’t quite make the cut as it seemed like the curators were spoilt for choice!

Writing the Ethnological Museum - PhD Opportunity

Supervisory team: Dr Priya Gopal (Cambridge) and Professor Dan Hicks (Pitt Rivers Museum)

This collaborative project uses the historic inscription practices of the Pitt Rivers Museum as a lens through which to study the history and ongoing legacies of the knowledge made through colonialism in the context of the ethnographic museum. Primary material includes all writing practices involved in the functioning of the anthropological museum as an institution from 1884 to the present day: from vocabularies of people and thing to museum labels as a genre, a narratology of annual reports and accession books, a close reading of the card index and database, and the study of the diversity of practices of writing on objects. The hands of particular curators and collectors and the re-writing of museum displays will be put into dialogue with a broader set of questions about the relationships between objectification through material culture and representation through text.

In a cross-disciplinary perspective that brings literary analysis into dialogue with linguistic anthropology through material culture, the research  will involve a literary study of language, writing and speech acts as imperial technologies of objectification in the academy in the past, and a consideration of the scope for rereading and revision today.

Case studies will be drawn from across the geographical, temporal and disciplinary scope of the Pitt Rivers, from Asia and Africa to the Americas and Oceania, with regional or thematic focuses developing from the student’s own interests.

The research will be conducted at the intersection between a series of present themes in postcolonial literary and museum studies, including thinking about ‘voice’; the politics of representation/self-representation; technologies of writing; the making and unmaking of cultural, racial and gendered identities; archival silences and archival traces; reparative histories; the construction of narratives of self and other; the politics of the ‘contact zone’ and encounter and the question of ‘culture wars’; aesthetics and politics; the constitution and/or reframing of the archive; the politics of the particular and the universal; authority and authorship; narrative strategies and ‘narrativity’; (re)reading against the grain; and resistance, dialogics and rewriting.

The contemporary politics of empire and colonialism and their ongoing legacies will be central to the project, but in supple ways which allow for considerations of resistance, reflexivity and reconstitution. It might be possible, for instance, to consider the ways in which texts can function as colonial disciplinary and governance mechanisms while examining the possibilities for radical rewriting and re-imagining in the wake of empire. A number of questions might govern a study:

• Can colonial documents/collections/practices be deployed towards new political claims or imaginings of community?
• What forms of ‘epistemic co-operation’ might be possible in the reconstitution of collections or archives?
• Can the collection(s) in question at all enable a revisioning of the relationship between the particular and the universal?
• How might the voices of resistance be found in the interstices or margins of colonial knowledge?
• Do the collections entrench epistemic scepticism or can they serve to provide reparative histories and knowledges?
• In the process of ‘objectification’, does the ‘subject’ disappear entirely?

The student will have a background in literary studies, and a demonstrable interest in any aspect of postcolonial studies, archival studies, or anthropology. 

Application process:

For details of how to apply, please see: http://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/19544/.  

Research Associate - Labelling Matters

Pitt Rivers Museum, South Parks Road, Oxford

Grade 7: £32,236 - £39,609 p.a.

The Pitt Rivers Museum is looking for a Research Assistant to manage a project that aims to identify and find ways to redress a range of ethical issues in the current displays. Are you a critical thinker ready to help tackle a complex problem around historical labelling and language-use in the much-loved and criticised Pitt Rivers Museum? The “Labelling Matters” project builds on inclusivity focused work being developed at the PRM and other ethnographic museums with the aim to dissect and dismantle some of the complex contested words, stereotypes and concepts that are present not only in museums but in society at large. What ways might we find to use the Pitt Rivers Museum Victorian age space, its historic labels and the contested nature of the collection to interrogate the Museum and related disciplines present and pasts? The Museum is seeking to appoint a Research Associate as part of our strategic vision to be a world-leading centre for the cross-disciplinary study of visual and material culture. The Research Associate will coordinate and carry out a review of the visual and textual language in the Museum’s main galleries and a selection of web-based microsites. This is a fixed-term post for 12 months and the postholder will work collaboratively with colleagues across the different sections of the Museum with regards to exhibition design and new interpretation guidelines as well as the other responsibilities outlined in the job description. Further details on the Oxford University website.