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16 Curating relations between ‘us’ and ‘them’: the changing role of migration museums in Australia1 Andrea Witcomb I would also like to ask two related things … which have puzzled me since a brief visit to the museum some years ago. One is to ask if you want donations of crafts and small items used in households in South Australia during [the] last century? These are from the wave of first settlers, ie. Anglo-Celtic. The related question is whether the museum is mainly about the subsequent waves of settlers or is the history of the early mainly Anglo
processes of cultural interconnection are simplified into narratives of ‘invasion’ and ‘liberation’. The reality for most people living in Egypt is likely to have been much more complex. Appreciating some of these complexities is important for understanding the cultural milieu that produced the distinctive funerary imagery of the Graeco-Roman Period. Significant non-Egyptian migrations into the Nile Valley are known from at least the Sixteenth Century BCE, with the arrival of peoples from western Asia known as the
among settled communities complicate the Lapita story. Ancestral Oceanic migrations and translations Around 3,500 years ago in the mid-second millennium BCE, a suite of newly combined practices and material cultures developed in the Bismarck Archipelago, east of Papua New Guinea ( Fig. 5.1 ) (Spriggs 1997 , 2006 ). Archaeologists have tended to refer to this emerging group as the Lapita culture or Lapita cultural complex, after the eponymous site in New Caledonia (Kirch 2017 ; Spriggs 2006 ), but I will attempt to distinguish between the eponymous Lapita
What is the future of curatorial practice? How can the relationships between Indigenous people in the Pacific, collections in Euro-American institutions and curatorial knowledge in museums globally be (re)conceptualised in reciprocal and symmetrical ways? Is there an ideal model, a ‘curatopia’, whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia, which can enable the reinvention of ethnographic museums and address their difficult colonial legacies? This volume addresses these questions by considering the current state of the play in curatorial practice, reviewing the different models and approaches operating in different museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world, and debating the emerging concerns, challenges and opportunities. The subject areas range over native and tribal cultures, anthropology, art, history, migration and settler culture, among others. Topics covered include: contemporary curatorial theory, new museum trends, models and paradigms, the state of research and scholarship, the impact of new media and current issues such as curatorial leadership, collecting and collection access and use, exhibition development and community engagement. The volume is international in scope and covers three broad regions – Europe, North America and the Pacific. The contributors are leading and emerging scholars and practitioners in their respective fields, all of whom have worked in and with universities and museums, and are therefore perfectly placed to reshape the dialogue between academia and the professional museum world.
This book presents a study of material images and asks how an appreciation of the making and unfolding of images and art alters archaeological accounts of prehistoric and historic societies. With contributions focusing on case studies including prehistoric Britain, Scandinavia, Iberia, the Americas and Dynastic Egypt, and including contemporary reflections on material images, it makes a novel contribution to ongoing debates relating to archaeological art and images. The book offers a New Materialist analysis of archaeological imagery, with an emphasis on considering the material character of images and their making and unfolding. The book reassesses the predominantly representational paradigm of archaeological image analysis and argues for the importance of considering the ontology of images. It considers images as processes or events and introduces the verb ‘imaging’ to underline the point that images are conditions of possibility that draw together differing aspects of the world. The book is divided into three sections: ‘Emergent images’, which focuses on practices of making; ‘Images as process’, which examines the making and role of images in prehistoric societies; and ‘Unfolding images’, which focuses on how images change as they are made and circulated. The book features contributions from archaeologists, Egyptologists, anthropologists and artists. The contributors to the book highlight the multiple role of images in prehistoric and historic societies, demonstrating that archaeologists need to recognise the dynamic and changeable character of images.
furniture than objects that materialise migration, growing super-diversity or urban experiences – how do we rationalise and focus a diverse ‘catch-all’ set of historical objects? How do we include contemporary Pasifika experiences within Aotearoa New Zealand,13 whether in the rural South Island attached to rugby team franchises, or in Auckland, which claims to be the largest Polynesian city in the world? How can the global and local be collected and exhibited when they are so intertwined? For a post-settler nation like Aotearoa New Zealand, part of the explanation for
geographic extent of these assemblages over time, we would be able to track the movement or migration of past people (Trigger 2006 , 232–60). Vere Gordon Childe, famous archaeologist and public intellectual, used this concept to build a detailed and meticulous history of prehistoric Eurasian people, their movements, and their efflorescences, which made clear that archaeologists could do more than just make sequences of objects: we could start to tell the stories of identifiable groups in the past (Childe 1925 , 1929 ). Childe was also an ardent Marxist, and he deeply
Egyptology is long overdue. The man and the reputation The work and ideas of Grafton Elliot Smith were extremely polarising both to his contemporaries and to those who succeeded him. His theory of cultural diffusionism was based on ‘the view that evolutionary development had occurred only once, on the banks of the Nile, and that civilisation had subsequently diffused from this single point’ (Burley 2008: 46). Although others, including W. H. R. Rivers (1911: 389), had previously raised the notion that cultural ideas and practices were transmitted through the migration of
. Magnus. (2002). ‘Metalworking and central places’, in B. Hårdh and L. Larsson (eds), Central Places in the Migration and Merovingian Periods. Lund: Lund University (pp. 159–84). Holbraad, M. and M.-A. Pedersen. (2017). The Ontological Turn: An anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hustak, C. and N. Myers. (2012). ‘Involutionary momentum: affective ecologies and the sciences of plant/insect encounters’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 23 (3), 74–118. Ingold, T. (2010). ‘The textility of making’, Cambridge Journal of
into Egypt. II ‘Libyans’ in Egypt Conspicuous during the late New Kingdom, the Third Intermediate Period and subsequently an important factor in the rise of the Saite state was the movement and settlement of peoples from the west into Egypt. The ‘Libyan’ character of this era and its significance has been recognised only gradually but the steady rise of the ‘Libyan peoples’ to positions of major political power within the country had important long-lasting effects for Egypt. The consequence of their migrations and invasions would eventually result in many of the