240024 VS Making Ethnographic Exhibitions: Theory and Practice (3.2.4) (2017S)

Historical and ethnographic museums have been the prime institutions of national legitimization and of construction and representation of both the national self and the ‘exotic’ Other; collections are infused with colonial pasts, unequal power relations as much as with fascination with the Other and desires to explore the world. Museums today, too, make visible political and power struggles as well as the tensions between the aims to educate, entertain, showcase cutting edge research and provide framing ideological narratives of both past and the present.
This course offers an introduction to the anthropological and critical study of ethnographic museums and will focus both on their history and present, as well as the museum’s changing role in contemporary society. Moreover, the course will focus heavily on the practice of making contemporary ethnographic exhibitions, thus engaging students in a production of an exhibition grounded in ethnographic research.
The course will be divided into three segments, two theoretical and one practical: (1) introduction into the history of museums and ethnographic collections and exhibition practice (2) followed up by an investigation of contemporary museum practices of exhibiting and engaging with the contested modes of representation of peoples and cultures, issues of cultural property, cultural ownership, identity politics, memory, heritage, political correctness and cultural preservation, as well as the repatriations of objects. This segment of the course will also investigate the tensions between the educational aspirations, the ‘Disneyfication’ of the museums, and the aim to present research based knowledge, which often lead to conflicts about the ways exhibitions are designed and presented to the public. Grounded in the basic theoretical knowledge, (3) the course will engage in the practice of making exhibitions and doing ethnography both in and of contemporary museums; it will explore possible modes of designing ethnographic exhibitions and presenting theory and research results through material exhibitions, while utilizing ethnographic collections both for research and exhibition practice.
By the end of the course, the students should learn how to think critically about museum exhibitions. Moreover, the course will develop the students’ practical skills needed to work in museums as well as providing them with theoretical perspectives on using material culture and exhibition design to express ideas, and thus interpret and present ethnographic collections/research to the public. The course incorporates field visits to ethnographic museums in order to question and critically evaluate the established modes of exhibiting, and to engage with museum professionals and collection keepers. Moreover, the students will collective conduct a brief ethnographic research among art students and then attempt to translate this into an ethnographic exhibition for which they will not only collect objects (such as artist’s waste) but also produce a catalogue.
(detailed overview of classes to come later)