Observing the complex through simple lenses

Lloyd A. Fallers. The Social Anthropology of the Nation State. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1974. xiii + 171 pp. Maps, tables, references, and index. $7.95.     

Mission Raquez: A forgotten ethnographic expedition through Laos in 1905

This paper focuses on Mission Raquez, a French ethnographic expedition through Laos to collect material for the Marseille Colonial Exposition of 1906. This paper discusses the location of extant material and considers the ethnographic methods used on the mission in conjunction with anthropological study, mass media, and popular celebrity in turn of the century France.     

Archaeology in African museums

Museums curate, document, conserve, and protect the earth's diverse natural and cultural heritage for purposes of educating humankind. Through research, exhibitions, and other activities that stress our common demominators and achievements, museums help us to forge and affirm local, ethnic, national, and international identities, unity, and pride. To accomplish such diverse goals, museums require dynamic, dedicated, ethical, and fairly well-educated staff. Museums must also be well-funded and should have local, national, and international support systems. This paper discusses the challenges faced by museum professionals in Africa, especially archaeologists, as they attempt to unearth, and in some cases reinterpret, Africa's cultural history.     

Governmental Suasion: Refocusing the Lowi Policy Typology

This paper argues that suasion should receive direct attention from political scientists who study public policy. Building on the work of Theodore Lowi and others, it is suggested that understanding politics as the result of the applicability of coercion misses important aspects of governmental activities. Suasion, unlike coercion, brings about certain forms of politics that are unique, quite unlike coercively based policies. Specifically, the author explores the advent of public health to discover how suasive policies affect politics.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.     

Plants as ethnographic subjects

Plants can be intriguing, challenging ethnographic subjects. Plants are communicative, agential and social. Engaging them ethnographically possibly expands the scope and relevance of ethnographic methods and theorizing. The phenotypic plasticity of plants makes them strikingly attuned to ethnographic concerns with place and its constitutions; they also actively constitute place through niche construction. There are various intellectual resources available for this kind of engagement through the long-established disciplines of phytosociology and botany, which, like ethnography, is a field-based practice.     

Imagining the social impact of museums and galleries: interrogating cultural policy through an empirical study

This paper aims to contribute to an understanding of how museums and galleries are regulated through an examination of the production and implementation of policy. It concentrates on those aspects that view them as vehicles through which social policy, such as that dealing with social inequality, can be implemented. To do this, it identifies the ways that motivations, behaviours and social outcomes of engagement are imagined by New Public Management-derived policy, and audit and evaluation tools. This is then examined using the results of a study of how visitors consume contemporary visual art galleries in north-east England, UK. The study concludes that the complex nature of engagement cannot be accommodated by policy in its present form and cannot be captured by existing audit and evaluation tools. It suggests that new approaches that acknowledge the roles visitors play in the construction of meanings need to be developed.     

Strategic management for visitor-oriented museums

Abstract: Strategic management is a familiar concept in for-profit organisations but is relatively new to museums. This paper presents and discusses a model of strategic management for visitor-oriented museums that aims to be more comprehensive than current approaches. It shows how museums can overcome the tension between the strategic demand to develop visitor-oriented museum services and the duties and social mandate of museums as public institutions that are defined by cultural policy—enabling access to cultural heritage, promoting broad cultural participation and providing informal education. Visitor-oriented strategic museum management is concerned with attracting a variety of visitors as well as the development of museum services that are appropriate to diverse museum audiences. The model presented here emphasises the comprehensive strategic management concept. Audience research and evaluation are shown to be valuable analytic and revision tools for strategic management in visitor-oriented museums.     

The social life of local museums

Through an ethnographic analysis of the social life of three non-anthropological 'museums' in a town in south-eastern Sicily, the contours of public space and public culture are examined in a political environment marked by deeply rooted political conflicts. Local and provincial 'politics of culture', a largely overlooked dimension in traditional anthropological approaches to politics in Sicily and Italy, are analysed. The article also investigates, from a Sicilian and ethnographic point of view, a proposition that underlies many recent North American studies on museums and the politics of culture. Employing a postmodern perspective, these studies have shown the political and conflictual character of museums. They are represented as institutions in which it is possible, if not indeed necessary,for the political and social tensions that roil public space to be represented in a controlled, dialogical form. Even when placed under the gaze of postmodern analysis, therefore, the museum is still viewed as retaining its character as a 'democratic' and public forum. This article looks at what happens in the case of 'museums' where public space assumes unexpected forms, less 'solid' and, instead, radically conflictual. In questo scritto, attraverso l'analisi etnografica della vita sociale di tre musei non antropologici di una piccola città della Sicilia sudorientale, l'autore esamina la conformazione della cultura e della spazio pubblici in un contesto connotato da forte e stratificata conflittualità politica. Intende così analizzare le 'politiche della cultura' messe in atto a livello locale e provinciale, una dimensione spesso poco considerata dagli studi antropologici tradizionali sulla Sicilia e l'Italia. Cerca, in conclusione, di mettere in evidenza e criticare, da un punto di vista etnografico e siciliano, un assunto di molte recenti analisi nord americane sui musei e sulle politiche culturali. Questi studi, assumendo spesso uno sguardo postmoderno, hanno esplicitato il carattere politico e conflittuale del museo. Esso, infatti, è presentato come un'istituzione nella quale è possibile, se non proprio necessario, rappresentare in forme dialogiche e controllate le tensioni politiche e sociali che agitano lo spazio pubblico. Anche in una prospettiva postmoderna, l'istituzione museo conserva, però, il proprio carattere democratico di 'forum' pubblico. Questo scritto si chiede allora cosa accade quando lo spazio pubblico assume conformazioni inattese, meno strutturate rispetto a quelle nordamericane e radicalmente conflittuali.     

Evaluating the efficiency of museums using multiple outputs: evidence from a regional system of museums in Spain

Data Envelopment Analysis is used to evaluate museum efficiency. This approach enables us to create a relative efficiency measure for each museum, taking into account resources used by museums and the performance of their activities based on four well-defined tasks: conservation, research, communication and exhibition. Empirical analysis of data from a regional museum system in Spain is performed, considering a complex production function with several inputs and outputs. The main findings indicate that at least half the museums chosen operate efficiently, with the major cause for inefficiency being inadequate resource management. Only few museums evidenced significant inadequate scaling problems. Major progress, mainly due to improvements in internal efficiency, is evident in the museum system ratios when analysing productivity evolution using the Malmquist Index. By contrast, technological change has less impact, proving that cultural heritage is less receptive to new technologies as compared to other cultural industries.     

数字博物馆的传播学研究

博物馆具有文化传播功能,但还具备专业化传媒组织的性质和地位。随着数字博物馆的兴起,其作为重要的文化传播载体,在传播主体的专业属性、传播内容的媒介功能、传播的交互性和整合化等方面都具有了新的特征,将成为"新媒体"的重要组成部分。     

韩国博物馆考察散记

本文通过对韩国几座博物馆的重点考察,对韩国博物馆的行业特色、陈列形式、建设理念和社会职能等做了深入了解和介绍,当将韩国博物馆行业的许多成功做法引为借鉴,使我们的工作更上一层楼。