The Post-Anthropological: Convergences Across Museums, Art, and Colonialism (AAA Panel, Vancouver BC 2019) (original) (raw)

2019, American Anthropological Association

In recent years and especially across European postcolonial contexts, the renaming, reform, and even reconstruction of anthropological museums is embedded within and reinforced by a fierce broader debate about the legitimacy, location, and expertise of anthropology itself. This 'climate' is marked by multivocal struggles including challenges to the institutions of anthropology from within, as well as by different communities and (indigenous) activists. Fundamentally, therefore, particularly regarding issues of restitution and ownership, this debate is not just about institutional change, but about transnational and transcultural reparation, repair, and justice. These climates of change have, however, also facilitated new kinds of collaborations and translations, such as between museums and artists, activists and scholars, that have, we observe, taken the debate about the legitimacy of anthropology beyond itself. In this panel, we interrogate the meaning and consequences of this, as we call it, 'post-anthropological' dynamic. Inflected by our own research of these developments in anthropological museums, and their convergences with contemporary art and debates on colonialism in Europe, we have observed that three areas of debate-current transformations of anthropological museums, contemporary art, and postcolonial critique-have arguably become the most productive and vibrant 'post-anthropological' fields. We take the tension implied in the 'post' not to represent a crisis of identity for anthropology, but a productive moment that may open up new ways of negotiating anthropological representation beyond itself. This debate is thus not just one within anthropology, but also and perhaps more significantly, about the elsewhere and otherwise of anthropology. The discussion on the post-anthropological is situated in current debates in museum studies, anthropology, and curatorial studies as well as linking discussions on colonial legacies with those on contemporary art. This panel responds to and challenges the notion of the 'post-anthropological' and the fields and debates associated with it: current transformations of anthropological museums, contemporary art, and post-colonial critique. It does so in particular by exploring case studies, both contemporary and historic, that extend this debate beyond European institutions and fields. In particular-and by way of a discussion led by Anthony Shelton (director of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC), we link these debates on the post-anthropological grappling with the legacies of the European colonial project with the changing climates in Canadian, Indian, and South Pacific contexts. These contributions also reflect on the ongoing struggles, and the limits as well as possibilities, afforded by calls for the decolonisation of anthropology and its related institutions. Co-sponsored by: Council for Museum Anthropology and Society for the Anthropology of Europe