Museum Worlds

Museum studies is an academic and practical field of research that is ever expanding and alive with potential, opportunity, and challenge paralleling the extraordinary growth of museums in every part of the world. Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, launched in 2012, has responded to the need for a rigorous, in-depth review of current work in museums and related industries, including galleries, libraries, archives, and cultural heritage. The inspiration for the journal came from Howard Morphy, Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra, along with founding editors Kylie Message, also at the ANU, and Sandra Dudley from the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.

This article asks if and how national museums today, which have in recent decades adopted a remit for social rights activism, have an obligation to engage with a broad spectrum of political participation and expression, including contemporary forms of far-right extremism and white grievance politics. How can museums engage with and respond meaningfully to the upsurge in acts of violence perpetrated in the name of structural, collective, and personal ideologies based on hate, xenophobia, and racism? Responding to these questions requires museums to move beyond acts of symbolic national commemoration and grapple with the human expressions and experiences of hate. Drawing on current museum scholarship and practice that is increasingly open to embracing research into studies of emotion and affect, as well as activism and its shifting narratives, the article concludes that the task of curatorial activism should be focused on effecting processes of structural—internal, institutional—change. Furthermore, this process can lead to the understanding that our forms of being human are not just related to our interpersonal interactions in the private sphere but also influence all aspects of civic and institutional life—including the ones that raise difficult questions or unpalatable truths about who we are, individually, and as citizens of the worlds to which we contribute.

The Maisons Tropicales are three prefabricated housing structures designed by Jean Prouvé. Fabricated in France, they were transported to and assembled in Brazzaville and Niamey, then part of the French colonies, around 1950. Their design was tied closely to the belief in the so-called civilizing and enlightening power of European modernist design and, thereby, also the French colonial agenda. In the early 2000s, an American collector, Robert Rubin, and a French art dealer, Eric Touchaleaume, “repatriated” the houses to France. There, they were transformed into and celebrated as icons of French modern design, while their colonial histories were ignored. This article analyzes the importance of discourse in this transformation and how it reflects ongoing dynamics of power and dispossession in the art world. Rubin and Touchaleaume simultaneously employed conflicting narratives mirroring anthropological “salvage” and “repatriation” discourses to describe the Maisons’ removal. The case study highlights the moral weight associated with the language around processes of repatriation, the nested relationships between heritage and the market, and the continuation of colonial practices of dispossession.

In this article, I argue that recontextualizing Indigenous cultural heritage through institutional acquisition and cataloging can also be understood as a jurisdictional strategy that upholds the supremacy of US and Canadian legal regimes over Indigenous laws. To do this, I share what I have learned from participating in a Nation-led, community-based research project with the Nuxalk First Nation Ancestral Governance Office, in what is currently British Columbia, Canada. Our work together focused on reinvigorating the Nation's laws, teachings, and protocols through the evolution of their own database of Nuxalk objects, still held in museum collections worldwide. I discuss this project and how it illustrates the legal context inherent to understanding much Nuxalk material culture. Next, bringing together literature on organizing knowledge in museums, settler colonial theories of dispossession, and archival copyright law, I look at how accessioning Indigenous objects into settler collections in the US and Canada is enacting another legal process, “written on top of” the legal meanings objects hold for the Nuxalk Nation, and reframing them as objects the museum has legitimate control and possession over. I close by reflecting on the strategies Nuxalk people, and other Indigenous artists and scholars, are undertaking to challenge the normative power of museum authority through interventions that are grounded in Indigenous governance and sovereignty.

Brazilian museum operations and maintenance practices, as well as collections and educational activities, can be important actors in communicating the risks of climate change and can be examples of best practice in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Documentary research for this article was conducted with museum institutions that promote operations and maintenance best practices applicable to the sector in Brazil. As a result, Brazilian cases were assessed for greenhouse gas emission and sustainable practice metrics focusing on energy efficiency. The results still show a low Brazilian commitment by the museum sector in the combat against climate change.

This work addresses how the history of the Portuguese colonial war and its mnemonic productions are (non)represented in the Portuguese Armed Forces museums (Army, Air Force, and Navy). Through an analysis of the textual and visual contents of the exhibitions, activity reports, and institutional communication texts; site visits; and interviews with the museums’ staff, I seek to identify and examine the contexts of creation of these spaces and the production of the exhibitions’ content. I conclude that these spaces manifest the complexity of addressing the colonial war and colonial pasts and communicating “difficult pasts” in military museums. When the topic is addressed, the exhibitions tend to focus on the Portuguese perspective of the conflict and elide its colonial nature. I advocate a reformulation of the colonial war musealization, in order to avoid the normalization of warfare and provide more plural and complex perspectives on this historical phenomenon.

This article presents findings and reflections of the Citizen Curators program, designed and led by the author on behalf of Cornwall Museums Partnership and seven participating museums. Dubbed an experiment in cultural democracy, as well as providing a novel alternative pathway into museum work, Citizen Curators took place between 2017 and 2021 with four cohorts resulting in more than 80 successful completers, one-fifth of whom went on to jobs in the sector. The program was designed as an action research project in curatorial education in an era of equity, socially engaged practice, and ethical awareness. The article presents qualitative and quantitative findings on the program's design, impact, and what was learned about the realities of cocuration, diversity, and inclusion over the four-year program.

To remain financially sustainable while promoting cultural activity and operating within artistic, symbolic, and cultural norms, museums must consider a multitude of commercial and organizational elements. This article examines the impact of economic, organizational, and structural characteristics of art museums on the repertoire of art they exhibit. Using a mixed-methods approach, we draw on data pertaining to 11 art museums in Israel that are supported by the Ministry of Culture, analyzing administrative data collected yearly from the museums from 2000 to 2014. Next, we analyze 20 interviews with museum directors, curators, and artists to further explore the findings that emerge from the analysis of administrative data. Findings indicate three factors that influence a museum's artistic repertoire: revenue structure, museum location (center or periphery), and the museum director's preferences. We discuss these factors and explain the significant role that nonartistic factors play in shaping cultural outcomes.

Decolonizing and Indigenizing work needs to be done in museums and our day-to-day lives. On Turtle Island or so-called North America, the current settler colonial states add urgency to this work. Many settlers live on stolen land and benefit from colonial structures in ways that Indigenous friends, colleagues, and hosts do not. This article presents a self-reflective account of two museum studies courses I have been part of developing and delivering that incorporate decolonizing and Indigenizing principles. From my white settler perspective, I discuss the need for settlers to educate (or reeducate) ourselves as museum practitioners by putting decolonizing and Indigenizing words into conversation with our accountabilities in daily life.

The article analyzes experiences in archaeology and ethnology museums in Brazil that promote collaborative actions with Indigenous peoples involving studies of collections, exhibitions, preventive conservation, and collection management policies. We reflect on how these practices supplant thoughts and practices of the past concerning Indigenous rights, especially those related to the dialogic relations between Indigenous people and museum professionals, and the inherent conflicts, disputes and negotiations involved in decision-making. We rely on published articles, documentation of exhibitions, and testimonies from Indigenous people to understand the development of and contributions to collaborative processes, presenting reflections on experiments that point us to circumstances and possibilities of joint/shared activities from representation to self-representation as expressions of the active participation of Indigenous peoples in museums.

The current research analyzes worldwide trends in which museums acted in response to a new global social health order. It is based on information from a survey we conducted among members of the International Committee of Regional Museums in addition to other surveys conducted by international museums and cultural bodies. We tried to understand how museums can remain relevant to their audiences, how they might evolve in this changing environment, and how they operate to reflect the new situation. Our main findings show that various methods were used, including shifting to digital platforms, changing physical operations, refocusing on local audiences, collecting materials relating to the COVID-19 crisis, and curating special exhibitions dedicated to the pandemic and its impact on daily lives.

The following conversation took place on 18 May 2021 during a panel discussion to coincide with marking the six months since the opening of the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, along with the annual occurrence of International Museum Day.

The attack on Benin City by British forces in 1897 has evolved into a symbol in the twenty-first century of the contested legacy of taking in military colonial conflicts. This revolves around questions of legitimacy of retention and, in a more focused manner, on the question of military looting. A number of scholars have written about the looting activities of British and other European forces concerning Yuanmingyuan (Tythacott 2018), Tibet (Carrington 2003; Harris 2012), and Benin City (Bodenstein 2018, 2020/1, 2022; Eyo 1997; Hicks 2020; Igbare 1970, 2007; Lundén 2016; Plankensteiner 2007; Ratté 1972; Shyllon 2019) to mention but a few. Some historians have provided an overview of the system that British land and naval forces operated to expropriate, and manage the expropriation of, artworks during colonial conflicts in the nineteenth century and prior (Finn 2018; Hevia 1994; Hill 1999; Spiers 2020). As noted in other publications (Lidchi and Allan 2020b; Lidchi and Hartwell 2022), colonial military conventions and codes that historically governed the taking of objects changed over the centuries, and this renders them somewhat opaque regarding what was being allowed and disallowed and how this was implemented. These governance structures, understood and applied by British army and naval forces, as well as such entities as the presidency armies of the East India Company, were obviously part of the “extractive statecraft” (Finn 2018: 17) of British governments that deployed a range of economic and military strategies to constrain and, in many cases, humiliate those who resisted while expanding the boundaries of trade and empire.

The Critical Zones project is a multipronged intervention toward what it calls earthly politics—transforming human engagement with Earth's processes. The project centers on an exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany—an institution known for its experiments in culture-making at the intersection of art, science, and politics. French academic Bruno Latour has long collaborated with the ZKM and its director, Peter Weibel. Critical Zones is their most recent collaboration, co-curated with Bettina Korintenberg and Martin Guinard.

On 10 January 2022, the French Senate adopted a proposed law on the circulation and return of cultural objects owned by public collections (Sénat 2022). This may be considered the first step toward repatriation legislation. This law needs to be analyzed, voted on, and possibly amended by the National Assembly before it comes back to the Senate and is finally approved. Assuming the law will be finally voted in, this will be a milestone in the process of clarifying the role and the status of human remains in museums collections.

As greater numbers of community groups experience social disconnect, museums need to find better methods of engagement in order to remain relevant. We know that museums are no longer neutral spaces; in fact, they have a role to play in activism, which means they can shift their mission to support local communities celebrate and protect their Indigenous heritage (Drubay and Singhal 2020; Message 2018; Shelton 2013). What follows is a meditation by researchers in Aotearoa New Zealand who engage with Pacific-Indigenous concepts and museum practice in unique ways. Our big idea is to see “Oceania through Indigenous eyes” (Lagi-Maama 2019: 291) and, in particular, the eyes of Nālani Wilson-Hokowhitu with mo‘okū‘auhau to Kalapana, Hawai‘i, and Moloka‘i Nui a Hina; Maree Mills with whakapapa to Tongariro, Taupō, and Ngāti Tūwharetoa; and Rachel Yates, who hails from Vaisala, Sāmoa. As a collective, their curatorial talanoa kōrero/mo‘olelo/stories connect to current debates in the museum world where local problems need local solutions. In this instance, Wilson-Hokowhitu and Mills share the ideas that shaped their mahi at Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato in Hamilton, and Yates has just finished a COVID-19 project as Curator of Pacific Cultures at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington.

In December 2021, the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture at the University of Otago (Dunedin campus) hosted an online symposium, convening Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars to talk about their work in and with museum and archival collections in the Pacific region. Held over three days, with morning and late afternoon sessions timed to facilitate maximum participation, attendees Zoomed in from Rapa Nui, Munich, New York, Honolulu, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, and Wellington. The symposium brought together practitioners, curators, artists, and scholars in a stimulating exchange that will continue into publication.

Organized by the Chinese National Museum of Ethnology and Yunnan University, the Third Biennial International Museum Anthropology Conference took place 30–31 October 2021. Seventy-six scholars in the fields of museum studies and anthropology from around the world joined the conference online to explore the theme of “Heritage and Community.” The purpose of this conference is to take museum anthropology as an analytic framework to explore how ethnic minorities, nation-states, and the global community engage with the values of integrity, harmony, strength, and vitality through materials and cultural heritage.

Anthropology, Art, and Ethnographic Collections: A Conversation with Howard Morphy

Jason M. Gibson (JG): In your book Museums, Infinity and the Culture of Protocols: Ethnographic Collections and Source Communities (Morphy 2020), you begin with an anecdote of visiting the Pitt Rivers Museum as a young child. Did museums play a part in sparking an interest in humanity, and its diversity, or were you fascinated by the Other?

Book Review: Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value, Howard Morphy and Robyn McKenzie, eds. (London: Routledge, 2022)

What does value mean within and beyond museum contexts? What are the processes through which value is manifested? How might a deeper understanding of these processes contribute to the practice of museum anthropology? These questions are explored in Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value, which looks at collaborative work in museums using ethnographic collections as a focus. Most of the chapters involve collections from Australia and the Pacific—reflecting the origins of many of them in two conferences associated with the project “The Relational Museum and Its Objects,” funded by the Australian Research Council and the Australian National University and led by Howard Morphy. Bringing together early career researchers, as well as museum-based scholars who have many years of thinking through and learning with community-based research partners, makes evident how the processual shifts in museum anthropology toward a more collaboratively grounded practice have become normalized, but crucially also highlights the value of “slow museology,” as the editors note in their introduction (3), acknowledging Raymond Silverman's (2015) term. While the editors caution that the core values of ethnographic collections and museums are not universal, the inclusion of chapters from beyond the Australia/Pacific region highlights that the foundational underpinning values and aspirations for cross-cultural work—“the desire for understanding” and “the desire to be understood” (22) are shaping much of the innovative museum-based work currently being carried out worldwide. Examples include Gwyneira Isaac's chapter on 3D technologies of reproduction and their value for Tlingit of Alaska, and Henrietta Lidchi and Nicole Hartwell's examination of how materiality and memory intersect in collections associated with nineteenth-century British military campaigns.

How to Practice Decoloniality in Museums: Practicing Decoloniality in Museums: A Guide with Global Examples Csilla E. Ariese and Magdalena Wróblewska (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021)

Listening to Art as the Voice of Our Time: The Online In-Conversation Series Indigenizing the (Art) Museum (Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge/OCAD University, Toronto)

National Museums in Africa: Some Reflections from the Continent: National Museums in Africa: Identity, History and Politics Edited by Raymond Silverman, George Abungu, and Peter Probst (London: Routledge 2022)

From Paddock to Peace Garden: Heritage Politics and the Development of the Japanese Memorial Site at Featherston

Shadows, Strings & Other Things: The Enchanting Theater of Puppets

[Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge (22 June 2021 to 20 April 2022)

Greenwood Rising Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma

First Americans: Tribute to Indigenous Strength and Creativity, Volkenkunde, Leiden, the Netherlands (May 2020 to August 2023)

Kirchner and Nolde: Up for Discussion, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (April–August 2021)

Australians & Hollywood, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra

Free/State: The 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (4 March–5 June 2022)

Te Aho Tapu Hou: The New Sacred Thread, Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato (7 August 2021 to 9 January 2022)

West Encounters East: A Cultural Conversation between Chinese and European Ceramics, Shanghai Museum (28 October 2021 to 16 January 2022)

The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum's Permanent Exhibition, Shanghai

The Way of Nourishment: Health-preserving Culture in Traditional Chinese Medicine, The Chengdu Museum, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China (29 June–31 October 2021)

Women Mean Business: Colonial Businesswomen in New Zealand. Catherine Bishop. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2019.

Imagining Decolonisation Rebecca Kiddle with Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Ocean Ripeka Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton, and Amanda Thomas, eds. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2020.

Cosmopolitan Ambassadors: International Exhibitions, Cultural Diplomacy and the Polycentral Museum Lee Davidson and Leticia Pérez Castellanos. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2019.

Museums, International Exhibitions and China's Cultural Diplomacy Linda Da Kong. London: Routledge, 2021.

Curating (Post-)Socialist Environments Philipp Schorch and Daniel Habit. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2021.

A Cultural Arsenal for Democracy: The World War II Work of US Museums Clarissa J. Ceglio. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2022.

Mobile Museums: Collections in Circulation Felix Driver, Mark Nesbitt, and Caroline Cornish, eds. London: UCL Press, 2021.

Écrire la muséologie: Méthodes de recherche, rédaction, communication [Writing museology, Research methods, writing, communication] François Mairesse and Fabien Van Geert. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle Ed, 2021.

Cultural Renewal in Cambodia: Academic Activism in the Neoliberal Era Philippe Peycam. Leiden: Brill, 2020.

Animal Classification in Central China: From the late Neolithic to the early Bronze Age Ningning Dong. Oxford: BAR Publishing, 2021.