Curatorship

The traditional work of curators—collecting, caring for, researching, and exhibiting artifacts in museums—has expanded in many directions in recent years. Curators today connect as well as collect. They work with several diverse communities: source communities, museum visitors, and researchers. While much of their work remains rooted in material culture and museums, they increasingly work with intangible cultural heritage and consider digital manifestations of culture. This bibliography offers historical and contemporary as well as theoretical and practical perspectives on curatorship. It begins with a listing of journals and organizations useful to scholars of curation and museum practitioners. The following sections, which list foundational texts and books of collected essays on museum curatorship, offer an introduction and overview of the field. Next is a section providing historical perspective on curatorship, including writing on important museums and exhibitions. This history is followed by sections describing the dual objects of curatorial work: intangible cultural heritage and material culture. Next is a section on curatorial work, divided into subsections that address theory, practice, and digital approaches. Decolonizing curatorial practice, which involves challenging museums’ colonial practices and including Indigenous people in the conservation, interpretation, and display of their material culture and histories, is a necessary corrective to and extension of this traditional work; subsections include shared authority, repatriation and restitution, and indigenizing curation. The bibliography ends with perhaps the most important topic: curatorial ethics. The focus is on anthropological curatorship, but we have included material from nearby fields, including art and history curatorship, when the additional perspective seems useful. The geographical focus is on the United States, and to a lesser extent Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, with a few entries describing European museum work. There are several other bibliographies in the Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology that complement this one. See the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles Museum Anthropology, Cultural Resource Management, and Public Archaeology.