Reassembling the Collection – Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency

A lucid, well-focused collection of essays that not only proposes a new engagement between anthropology and archaeology, but challenges weary methodologies in museology and tired museum practices. This stimulating volume proposes nothing less than a Mobius museology in which established disciplinary, epistemological, and ethical dualisms are exchanged for an infinitely more nuanced, complex, and dialogical approach. This broad sensibility intermeshes academic, indigenous, and practical viewpoints in the best tradition of critical scholarship to imagine a new terrain on which the importance and significance of museum collections can be reassessed in a non-consensual and increasingly globalized and intercultural world. --Anthony Alan Shelton, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver

The book begins with an introduction by Rodney Harrison, at the end of which he hopes that some of the ways of thinking about collections suggested by the chapters might inform everyday museum practices.... Each of the chapters succinctly and clearly sets out different aspects of many of the current sensibilities, methodologies, and conclusions of scholars of material culture working with 'indigenous peoples.' --Alison Petch, Book Review Essays

The book begins with an introduction by Rodney Harrison, at the end of which he hopes that some of the ways of thinking about collections suggested by the chapters might inform everyday museum practices.... Each of the chapters succinctly and clearly sets out different aspects of many of the current sensibilities, methodologies, and conclusions of scholars of material culture working with 'indigenous peoples.' --Alison Petch, Book Review Essays