Lost and Found

This chapter examines systems of classification supporting the front stage of museum exhibits. It traces the roots of European museum taxonomies found in colonial expositions and early museums of African art. It discusses the floorplans and displays strategies of French museums and contrasts them with theories proposed by anthropologists and African intellectuals. Museum classifications reflect inherited epistemologies and those of their era. These classifications are translated into labels and strategies for staging displays exhibitions, and expositions, that is, into exhibitionary complexes. The chapter concludes with a discussion of reconfigurations of the museum landscape with contrasting evidential support. It explores French museum closings and their deconstruction in relationship to historical antecedents and problems of labeling and reinstallation.

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.

Museum education in semi-peripheries: social, cultural and economic aspects of the globalisation of Polish and Slovak heritage institutions

The paper examines the problem of change in Central-Eastern European museum education in the globalising world. The main objective is to answer the question of whether museums located in peripheral regions of semi-peripheral states introduce patterns developed in global core-states or maintain the approach invented during the former political period. Its main assumption is that globalisation is a discursive process engaging global, national and local cultural elements, leading to reshaping of local patterns. The paper is based on 14 in-depth interviews conducted with curators working at local museums of the Subcarpathian and Košice regions, supported by four interviews carried out with museum workers of national museums in Warsaw and Bratislava.

Unrealizations: The making and unmaking of two Japanese-designed extensions to European museums

Unrealized architecture is culturally significant. Although they remain imaginary, unrealized buildings happen to a community, often leaving unintended material and social traces. This article argues that unbuilt projects contribute actively to the production of locality and the meaning of neighborhoods and institutions. Drawing on theoretical investments from Appadurai and Yaneva, this article analyzes motifs of locality and globality in long-lasting controversies surrounding two unrealized Japanese-designed extension projects to European museum buildings: the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern in Valencia. The analysis demonstrates that despite their spectacular confrontations, supporters and opponents in both cases shared similar notions of the affected neighborhoods and museums as meaningful social and cultural spaces. The controversies revolved around whether or not the Japanese-designed expansions would violate or reawaken perceived local energies and qualities. Engaging a little-studied dimension of cultural globalization, the article asks: what sort of locality emerges from unmaking globality-inflected monumental architecture?

‘Meet the Vikings’—or meet halfway? The new Viking display at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen

How does a major European museum maintain its high profile as a cultural institution when faced with dwindling public funds? The decision of the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen to refurbish its Viking gallery under the direction of a celebrity designer has caused a stir far beyond Denmark. Appointed in 2017, the Museum's director, Rane Willerslev, has vowed to set this venerable institution on a more contemporary and commercially viable track. As one of his first major initiatives, he contracted the fashion designer and reality television star Jim Lyngvild to brush up the Viking Age gallery—one of the museum's most prominent international attractions, but strangely a hitherto somewhat neglected part of the display.