Call for papers - Contested Conservation - Special Issue Museums & Social Issues (original) (raw)
Related papers
Museum Management and Curatorship, 2005
To cite this article: Carol E. Mayer (2012): Museums, colonialism and identity: a history of Naga collections in Britain (contributions in critical museology and material culture), Museum Management and Curatorship, 27:4,[431][432][433] To link to this article: http://dx.
2024
The International Committee for Museums and Collections of Ethnography (ICME) has welcomed through the years museum professionals from around the globe, to discuss and exchange the ideas, values and aspirations that surround ethnographic museums, their communities, and territories. Each year, the conference is organized in a different country, for which a partnership is established with a local museum or cultural institution that serves as a host. ICOM's national, international committees and regional alliances are also invited to play a crucial role, providing this event with a local/international impact, and shaping the themes according to the most urgent needs of our sector. This year, with an inclusive approach and following our desire to promote diversity in all our components, the 2024 edition of our conference will be held at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, whose development for six decades and rich collections of Mesoamerican peoples turn it into one of the largest ethnographic museums in the world, and one of the most relevant institutions for the preservation of the American continent pre-Hispanic and contemporary history.
Contested Holdings: Museum Collections in Political, Epistemic and Artistic Processes of Return, 2022
Works of ancient and modern art, archaeological or ethnographic artefacts, physical anthropology and natural history collections generally occupy separate realms in the museum world, with dedicated institutions and disciplines. Yet, the claims on museum collections made by former owners, descendant communities or nations, and the growing discourse surrounding these claims, unite them in a very specific category, one that we will set out to define and will refer to as 'contested holdings'. As such, they can range from old masters owned by Jewish collectors in the 1930s to the ancestral remains of indigenous populations, which were fervently sought after by racial anthropologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They can include things that may appear to have little in common at first glance; therefore, the term 'holdings' in no way qualifies the nature of the things referred to and for which, in some cases, even the term 'object' or 'artefact' proves problematic. It indicates, rather, their state as kept collections, which has become problematic due to the conditions in which they were taken at some point in their trajectories. It is the questioning of these conditions, the perception that museums and public opinion have of them and how they are judged that, in fine, defines the contested holding.
Archaeology & Neoliberalism, 2013
Few areas have been more thoroughly explored than that whose borders are delimited by the notions of museum, heritage, technology and market. So it never ceases to be a paradox that we still have no explanation for one surprising and symptomatic fact: the early museums of the eighteenth century do not show exceptional pieces, but stones, bones, shells, feathers, maps, models, microscopes, looms, ploughs and so on. But what are all these ordinary things doing in a museum?
Collections as Relations - Contestations of Belonging, Cultural Heritage, and Knowledge Infrastructures, 2025
This chapter argues that anthropological and global art collections are an important starting point for understanding different kinds of relationships between objects and media, and the multiple actors and institutions who have engaged with them over time. It shows how the focus on collections as relations opens up new perspectives on (1) the micropolitics and dynamics of belonging, (2) the constructions of cultural heritage and property disputes, and (3) the emergence of new kinds of knowledge infrastructures within and beyond institutional environments. In all these regards, the chapter argues that the ongoing contestations in all of these areas can lead to new ways of thinking of and managing evolving relationships, but that there is also an inertia and a resistance to change in institutional contexts. Consequently, while the focus on collections as relations may offer new perspectives on how collecting institutions and those who interact with and are responsible for them can reposition themselves in the face of current contestations, the actual outcomes of these dynamics are still uncertain.