Building Bodies in the Australian Periphery: The Enactment of Aboriginality in Tasmania (original) (raw)

The University of Michigan Museum Studies Program's series of "Working Papers in Museum Studies" presents emerging research from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, all focused on the multiple concerns of the modern museum and heritage studies field. Contributions from scholars, members of the museum profession and graduate students are represented. Many of these papers have their origins in public presentations made under the auspices of the Museum Studies Program. We gratefully thank the authors published herein for their participation.

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Is cultural democracy possible in a museum? Critical reflections on Indigenous engagement in the development of the exhibition Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum

Recent museological scholarship emphasises visitor participation and democratic access to cultural heritage as key to securing the ongoing relevance and future sustainability of museums. But do legacies of colonialist collecting practices and hierarchical conventions of representation in museums afford the possibility of genuine cultural democracy? This paper explores this question via detailed analysis of the Encounters exhibition, developed by the National Museum of Australia in partnership with the British Museum and promoted as an unprecedented partnership between the institutions and Indigenous Australian communities. Drawing on an extensive and emerging literature on museums, community engagement, participation and democracy, in tandem with analysis of public critiques and Indigenous responses to the exhibition, the paper suggests that the extent of Indigenous agency within the collaboration fell short of the articulated goals of the project. It concludes that the concept of maximal participation and release of agency to communities of interest may be difficult to achieve within existing museum frameworks.

Visible art, invisible artists? the incorporation of aboriginal objects and knowledge in Australian museums

Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, 2013

The creative power and the economic valorization of Indigenous Australian arts tend to surprise outsiders who come into contact with it. Since the 1970s Australia has seen the development of a system connecting artist cooperatives, support policies and commercial galleries. This article focuses on one particular aspect of this system: the gradual incorporation of Aboriginal objects and knowledge by the country's museums. Based on the available bibliography and my own fieldwork in 2010, I present some concrete examples and discuss the paradox of the omnipresence of Aboriginal art in Australian public space. After all this is a country that as late as the nineteenth century allowed any Aborigine close to a white residence to be shot, and which until the 1970s removed Indigenous children from their families for them to be raised by nuns or adopted by white people. Even today the same public enchanted by the indigenous paintings held in the art galleries of Sydney or Melbourne has l...

COOK, I., LYALL, J., PEARSON, C. & SLOGGETT, R. 1999. – Understanding Museum, in Museums in Australia, eds. D. Griffin, and L. Paroissien, National Museum of Australia, Canberra:

This chapter provides an overview of the history of the development of cultural materials conservation in museums in Australia.

Maintaining Aboriginal Engagement in Australian Museums: Two Models of Inclusion

Museum Management and Curatorship, 2014

Recent decades have seen efforts by museums to become more inclusive and to open up space for the sharing of different voices and different perspectives. Such efforts have been driven by broader social and political changes in support of these inclusive practices. In Australia, where the political context has shifted away from policies of Aboriginal self-determination, a potential gap has opened between museum and government priorities with regard to Aboriginal engagement, putting efforts toward inclusion at risk. It is therefore vital to consider how museums have enacted practices of inclusion and to consider their vulnerabilities to changing social and political contexts. To illustrate such consequences, this paper considers Aboriginal inclusion within two Australian state museums, the Australian Museum and Museum Victoria, and argues that inclusionary practices need to enter institutional structures in order to have sustained meaning despite broader political change.

Lives of Exhibitions Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation MA Cultural Geography Dissertation

The British Museum’s exhibition Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation was shown in Room 35 between 23rd April and 2nd August 2015 against a background of significant changes in the ways that museums work, especially in their relationships with Indigenous communities. This dissertation applies multiple methodologies to explore the extent of the exhibition. In doing so it draws particularly on Actor-Network Theory approaches as a way of understanding the circumscription and dynamics of exhibitions. It concludes that museum exhibitions can usefully be seen as emerging from a dynamic ‘field’ of associations, and that understanding of this ‘field’ can be enhanced with reference to the Polynesian concept of ‘vā’, and the related idea of activation.

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