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240527 VO MM3 Introduction to Museum Anthropology (2024S)

5.00 ECTS (2.00 SWS), SPL 24 - Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie
Moodle

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Details

Language: English

Examination dates

Lecturers

Classes (iCal) - next class is marked with N

  • Tuesday 05.03. 13:15 - 14:45 Hörsaal A, NIG 4.Stock
  • Tuesday 19.03. 13:15 - 14:45 Hörsaal A, NIG 4.Stock
  • Tuesday 09.04. 13:15 - 14:45 Hörsaal A, NIG 4.Stock
  • Tuesday 16.04. 13:15 - 14:45 Hörsaal A, NIG 4.Stock
  • Tuesday 23.04. 13:15 - 14:45 Hörsaal A, NIG 4.Stock
  • Tuesday 30.04. 13:15 - 14:45 Hörsaal A, NIG 4.Stock
  • Tuesday 07.05. 13:15 - 14:45 Hörsaal A, NIG 4.Stock
  • Tuesday 14.05. 13:15 - 14:45 Hörsaal A, NIG 4.Stock
  • Tuesday 21.05. 13:15 - 14:45 Hörsaal A, NIG 4.Stock
  • Tuesday 28.05. 13:15 - 14:45 Hörsaal A, NIG 4.Stock
  • Tuesday 04.06. 13:15 - 14:45 Hörsaal A, NIG 4.Stock
  • Tuesday 11.06. 13:15 - 14:45 Hörsaal A, NIG 4.Stock
  • Tuesday 18.06. 13:15 - 14:45 Hörsaal A, NIG 4.Stock

Information

Aims, contents and method of the course

This lecture introduces students to museum anthropology as a sub-discipline concerned with the
history, politics, and ethics of ethnographic collections in museological contexts. The aim of the
lecture is to provide students with an understanding of both the historical formation of this sub-
discipline and the ethnographic museum itself. Students will learn about early practices of collection
and exhibition and how these changed through time. A focus lies on current museological debates,
including new museological approaches, decolonizing the museum through provenance research and
resistitution, and the uses of digital anthropology in the museum. The lecture also conveys what roles
anthropologists have assumed in institutions exhibiting ethnographic collections, the role of the
anthropologist as curator, and the building of relationships with indigenous communities. Practices of
archiving, cataloguing, and preserving objects will equally be discussed as part of this lecture.

Assessment and permitted materials

The course involves formal lectures with the use of audio and visual materials. Students are expected
to write an exam at the end, which will consist of questions to which they have to provide short written
answers.

Minimum requirements and assessment criteria

To pass the course, students have to reach at least 51% of all points.
Grades:
1: 100 % bis 91 %
2: 90 % bis 76 %
3:75 % bis 61 %
4: 60 % bis 51 %
5: 50% and lower

Examination topics

Lecture contents and specific readings

Reading list

Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. 1. publ. Cambridge [u.a.]:
Cambridge Univ. Press.

Belting, Hans, and Andrea Buddensieg, eds. 2009. The global art world: Audiences, markets, and museums. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.

Bishop, Claire, and Dan Perjovschi. 2014. Radical museology or, "what’s contemporary" in museums of contemporary art?
2., rev. ed. London: Koenig Books.

Bunzl, Matti. 2016. In search of a lost avant-garde: An anthropologist investigates the contemporary art museum. Paperback edition. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press.

Geismar, Haidy. 2012. Museum + Digital = ? In Digital Anthropology : Digital anthropology, ed. Heather A. Horst and
Daniel Miller, 266–78. London: Berg.

Grau, Oliver, Viola Rühse, and Wendy Coones. 1901. Museum and Archive on the Move: Changing Cultural Institutions in
the Digital Era. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Hicks, Dan. 2020. The brutish museums: The Benin bronzes, colonial violence and cultural restitution. London: Pluto Press.

Karp, Ivan, and Steven Lavine. 1991. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press.

Kuper, Adam, 2023. The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions. London: Profile Books.

Lowenthal, David. 1986. The past is a foreign country. Reprinted. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Macdonald, S. 2003. ‘Museums, national, postnational and transcultural identities’. Museum and Society 1(1): 1–16.

Mirzoeff, N. 2017. Empty the museum, decolonize the curriculum, open theory. Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 25 (53). doi:
10.7146/nja.v25i53.26403.

Modest, Wayne, Nicholas Thomas, Doris Prlic, and Claudia Augustat. 2019. Matters of belonging: Ethnographic museums in a changing Europe. Leiden: Sidestone Press.

Rydell, Robert W. 1987. All the world's a fair: Visions of empire at American international expositions, 1876-1916.
Paperback ed. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Stocking, George W., ed. 1989. A Franz Boas reader: The shaping of American anthropology, 1883-1911. Midway Reprint.
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Association in the course directory

Last modified: We 21.08.2024 12:06