'[...] But it's Not Like I Know Anything About Them!': Immigrants in the Museum in Finland

Abstract

Museum education has undergone a profound transformation from the ideals of the Enlightenment through modernism to those of postmodernism. Museum visitors are no longer perceived as passive receivers of information provided by experts but as active learners who freely construct their own meanings, driven by their personal motivation. Museum education is no longer about educating the masses but facilitating learners in their individual learning processes. Learning outcomes are no longer to be measured by the amount of new information absorbed in an exhibition but by more abstract things: improved quality of life, increased awareness of one's own identity, and better self-esteem or increased ability to cope in society. The question is: how can museums provide their visitors with such learning possibilities? This article presents three projects that have been carried out at the Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova Museum in Turku, Finland, to test methods and models for increased personal experience and involvement, especially in facilitating interaction and understanding between cultures. As a result of this it is proposed that exhibitions and their related activities should be planned in such a way that they facilitate the self-on — the individual's projection and associations through involvement of emotions — thus facilitating connections between the exhibition and contemporary life.     

A Shield Loaded with History: Encounters,Objects and Exhibitions

This article discusses an Aboriginal shield in the British Museum which is widely believed to have been used in the first encounter between Lieutenant James Cook's expedition and the Gweagal people at Botany Bay in late April 1770. It traces the ways in which the shield became ‘Cook-related’, and increasingly represented and exhibited in that way. In the wake of its exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in late 2015 and early 2016, the shield gained further public prominence and has become enmeshed within a wider politics of reconciliation. A recent request from the La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council to the British Museum to review knowledge about the shield has contributed to a reappraisal of claims about its connection to Cook's 1770 expedition. Preliminary findings of this review are presented. In the process, the article addresses larger questions concerning the politics surrounding the interpretation of the shield as a historically ‘loaded’ object.     

Performing science amongst the filing cabinets. Women,anthropology and museums in Belgium (1930–1970)

I trace the scientific trajectory and identity of Olga Boone (1903–1992), the first female scientist working in the Belgian Congo Museum's ethnography section. Uncovering Boone's relatively unknown and remarkably diverse research in ‘ethnic’ geography, musicology and bibliography, and her fieldwork in Congo, serves as a point of entry into a less well-known period in and ‘unofficial’ history of Belgian twentieth-century anthropology. It also provides a window into museums as gendered spaces, particularly aspects of (in)visibility and materiality in collections and archives.

Abbreviations: AA: African abstracts; BCM: Belgian Congo Museum; ESA: Ethnographic survey of Africa; IAI: International African Institute; IRCB: Institut Royal Colonial Belge; IRSAC: Institut de Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale; MFA-AA: Ministry of Foreign Affairs – African archives; OB: Olga Boone; RMCA(A): Royal Museum for Central Africa (archives)     

What is a museum for? The Magüta Museum for the Ticuna people,Amazonas, Brazil

Abstract

After working for several years in the Ethnography Section of Brazil's National Museum, Maria JussaraGomes Gruber helped found the Magüta Museum in the town of Benjamin Constant, in Amazonas (close to Brazil's border with Peru and Colombia). Jussara Gruber believed that an ethnographic museum, with objects selected, displayed and explained in ways that made sense to the Ticuna Indians of the area, would help them to sustain social and cultural values in the face of continuing colonization by non-Indian society. The Ticuna are one of Brazil's most populous indigenous groups, with some 95 villages mainly scattered along the banks of the Upper Solimões River and its tributaries. Ticuna efforts to establish land boundaries and reclaim their own territory have met substantial opposition from non-Indian loggers, landowners and storekeepers. In this article (compiled from a letter and subsequent telephone interview translated by Maria Renata Franco Peters and edited by Bill Sillar) Constantino Ramos Lopes explains his role as director of the museum and its significance for the Ticuan people.     

The ‘Pacific-First’ Alternative in American World War II Strategy

R.J. OVERY. The Air War, 1939–1945. London, Europa Publications, 1980. Pp. xn, 263. £12.50; H. PENROSE. British Aviation; Widening Horizons, 1930–1934. London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office and the Royal Air Force Museum, 1979. Pp.viii, 340. £7.95; British Aviation; Ominous Skies, 1935–1939. London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office and the Royal Air Force Museum, 1980. Pp. vm, 318. £7.95.     

Foodstuff placement in ibis mummies and the role of viscera in embalming

Recent excavation of a mummified ibis, in whose bill were found numerous snails, and the 2010 radiological study of ibis mummies from Yale's Peabody Museum drew attention to the presence of bird foodstuffs intentionally placed inside mummified ibises following evisceration. The foodstuff packing in the Peabody's ibises was likely contained within the birds' own viscera. Radiographs of a hatchling ibis mummy at McGill's Redpath Museum demonstrated similar placement of foodstuffs within the eviscerated body cavity. This pattern of ibis evisceration, with the previously unreported practice of foodstuff packing, suggests the provision of an afterlife food source to the bird. These findings lend support to the idea that the viscera of ibises, and humans alike, were meant to continue their living function in the afterlife. Given that organs of digestion and respiration were specifically preserved and retained within, or in conjunction with, human mummies, the implication is that animals were also treated with similar respect and care, and the crucial role of the viscera was recognised.     

THE OPEN LETTERS OF SERGEI BORISOV: FROM THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE ALTAI

The present study focuses on the biography and artistic heritage of S.I. Borisov, one of Barnaul's most successful photographers of the early 20th century. Borisov's archive is kept at the Altai State Museum of Local Studies and includes materials from his photographical expeditions to the Altai in 1907–1914. The analysis of the photographs given here creates an image of this multiethnic region as it was at that time in all its diversity of culture and tradition.     

Immunological evidence of Plasmodium falciparum infection in an Egyptian child mummy from the Early Dynastic Period

A 15–18 months old child mummy, presently housed in Turin's Museum of Anthropology, was discovered in Gebelein (Upper Egypt) during excavations carried out by the Missione Archeologica Italiana, most likely in 1914.     

PROJECTIONS OF RACE,NATURE, AND ETHNOGRAPHIC CHILDHOOD IN EARLY EDUCATIONAL CINEMA AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CANADA

In this article, we examine depictions of race, nature, and childhood in Harlan Ingersoll Smith's early ethnographic films at the National Museum of Canada. Created in the 1920s for a children's education programme, Smith's films construct ethnographic portraits of different Indigenous peoples in Western Canada. We demonstrate how museum education appropriated Indigeneity as a discursive resource to immerse viewing children in particular narratives of Canadian national heritage and development. The films worked through a complex double movement, bringing children in the Ottawa museum audience into association with Indigenous children based on shared experience as children while simultaneously differentiating Indigenous peoples as Other. The films inculcated white youth at the museum in a romanticized connection to Canada's prehistory through knowledge of the nation's Indigenous peoples as well as nature. In the films, the position of Indigeneity within the future remained ambiguous (traditional practices sometimes disappearing, sometimes enduring). Yet, despite Smith's uncertainty about colonial beliefs in the disappearance of Indigeneity, his films nonetheless presented the teleological development of the settler nation as certain. Our article highlights how thinking about children, as audience for and thematic focus of these films, extends discussions of the geographies of film, of children, and of settler colonial nationalism.     

The Impossible Aesthetic: the Abelam,the Moa Bird and Me

This paper explores the ramifications of encounters which two Abelam men and the author had in the Australian Museum and Taronga Zoo in Sydney, 1982. Rather than place a ready-made analytic framework on the men's experiences and rather than removing myself from the frame, as is usual in much anthropological analysis, I have chosen to explore the effects of these experiences on my own imagination. In the latter part of the paper I explore the way in which the imaginative entanglement of the Zoo and Museum experiences with my own memories has acted as a path of clues. This path has led to the development of the notion of sign which includes the idea of efficaciousness and transformation.     

‘Comradeship’ and ‘Friendship’: Masculinity and Militarisation in Germany's Homosexual Emancipation Movement after the First World War

This article analyses the impact of the First World War on Germany's homosexual emancipation movement. I argue that the war was a turning point for the nation's gay movement, as it provided a central ideal – comradeship – which altered the ways in which homosexual rights organisations defined homosexuality and masculinity. A militarised rhetoric permeated the language of gay rights groups in the 1920s, providing a vision of a spiritually and politically emancipated hypermasculine gay man who fought to legitimise ‘friendship’ and secure civil rights. The article relies on the publications of three major homosexual rights organisations recently collected at the Schwules Archiv und Museum in Berlin.     

The National Air and Space Museum,Washington, D.C.

Abstract

Space technology is not only one of the major subjects of this spacious and gracious new Museum on Washington's Mall, it also contributed greatly to its record construction programme and it opening ceremony. Above all its designers hope that 85 complex audio-visual exhibits will perform faultlessly thanks to MACS, the Museum Automatic Control System. This central computer control unit, complete with its space-age back-up system, constantly monitors the performance of all moving exhibits, whether puppets, films or slides. Any fault is detected instantly and thus can be repaired quickly.     

“From one April to another”: remembering and acknowledging the Holocaust in the poetry of Michael Longley

Michael Longley has written and spoken of the responsibility to commemorate the Holocaust in a manner which is free from historical or political distortion. This article will consider his poetry about the Holocaust in the light of these statements, arguing that the epigraph in Gorse Fires (1991) from the work of Paul Celan provides an indication of Longley's strategy. The close association of elegy and botanical life in Longley's work manifests in the reconfiguration of remembrance poppies in relation to Celan and the Holocaust. The article discusses Longley's work in relation to Ireland's refugee policies during the Second World War, with recourse to the poems “Buchenwald Museum” and “Poppies”. Finally, the article considers Longley's personal link to the Holocaust through his friend Helen Lewis. The representation of the Holocaust in Longley's poetry is always associated with other traumatic events and this article extracts the threads which entangle Longley's evocations of historical violence.     

The contested interpretation of heritage landscapes in northern Ireland

Abstract

Because the nature of society is both negotiated and contested, cultural artefacts, including heritage landscapes, will be invested with differing and conflicting meanings by various social groups. This is but one aspect of what might be termed the dissonance of heritage. The present discussion is framed within the context of the argument that relics of the past are a resource to be selectively exploited in accordance with contemporary political and cultural demands. The paper uses the example of Ulster's Folk and Transport Museum to examine these issues. It concludes that while consumers do appreciate the cultural complexity of the Museum's role as one medium of communication of identity in a contested society, the institution's effectiveness in this regard is undermined by the middle‐class bias of those consumers.     

Archaeology and Authenticity in South African Heritage Locales and Public Spaces

Abstract

This article investigates the construction, display and consumption of archaeological authenticity at two museums and two heritage-themed entertainment locales in South Africa. I consider authenticity not simply as intrinsic, but as strongly framed by physical and conceptual locations, before audience experiences and post-colonial priorities. I use as case studies the Maropeng visitor centre at the Cradle of Humankind, the Origins Centre Museum at the University of the Witwatersrand, Sun City's Lost City, and the Monte Casino entertainment complex in northern Johannesburg.     

Bihar,California, and the US Midwest: the early radicalization of Jayaprakash Narayan

Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) is often remembered as a ‘Gandhian Socialist’ because of his explicit rejection of revolutionary Marxism in and embrace of Gandhian principles in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the easy mapping of a ‘Marx to Gandhi’ trajectory in JP's political life minimizes the complexity of his political journey, in which cultural nationalism and internationalist Marxian thought were intertwined. This article, based on JP's 1972 interview with Hari Dev Sharma of the Nehru Memorial Library and Museum, investigates his early radicalization in the 1920s, and examines the uneven development of his political consciousness in that context. As such, it makes a specific contribution to the historical record of Indian revolutionaries, bringing JP into that story and suggesting that his later political turns may have had as much to do with the crises of global revolutionary thought and organization in the interwar period as with his own ideas and beliefs.     

Vital Creativity: Exhibiting Beauty and Heritage in Material Culture

Museum exhibits are an important but often overlooked source of anthropological, folklore and decorative art analyses. Some exhibits are cross-cultural and focus on object types; others deal with the cultures of particular peoples. This review assesses two exhibit catalogues that deal with each of these two types: Gavin, Pierce, and Pleguezuelo's Cerámica y Cultura: The Story of Spanish and Mexican Mayólica deals with one art form and its development, and Griffith's Hecho a Mano: The Traditional Arts of Tucson's Mexican American Community documents the home arts of Mexican Americans in Tucson, Arizona during the 1990s.     

Birdmen, cemís and duhos: material studies and AMS C dating of Pre-Hispanic Caribbean wood sculptures in the British Museum

This paper presents 19 AMS radiocarbon dates from nine pre-Hispanic Caribbean (Taíno/Lucayan) wooden sculptures in the British Museum collections, provenanced to Jamaica, Hispaniola and the Bahamas. Together with strontium isotope results and wood and resin identifications, these data build a material and chronological context for some of the most recognised examples of Taíno art – from duhos (ceremonial seats) and cemís (free standing depictions of deities, ancestors and spirits) to canopied stands used to hold hallucinogenic drugs during the cohoba ceremony. Each sculpture widens our understanding of Caribbean carving traditions, stylistic variation, chronologies and material resource utilisation. A group of three sculptures recovered from Carpenters Mountains, Jamaica, carved by AD 1300 and brought together as a ceremonial ‘set’, each appear to have had their inlays renewed over a century later, suggesting long-term use. Three key examples of the main Caribbean duho categories (high-back, low-back and extended), provide insights into the diversity of styles present in the region post-AD 1100. The British Museum's corpus enables an exploration of regional styles, and potentially the work of individual artists.