Reassembling the Collection presents innovative approaches to the study of historical and contemporary engagements between museums and the various individuals and communities who were (and are) involved in their production and consumption. Reassembling the Collection is interdisciplinary in scope and international in coverage. It addresses fundamental questions about the nature, value, and efficacy of museum collections in a postcolonial world, and the entangled agencies of those who have made, traded, received, collected, curated, worked with, researched, viewed, and experienced them in the past and present. In moving beyond the concerns of the politics of representation that have dominated critical museum studies, Reassembling the Collection considers the material networks and affective qualities of "things" alongside their representational role within the museum and explores the ways in which concepts of agency and indigeneity need to be reconfigured in light of the study of these concepts within the museum context. The contributors explore key concepts including the idea of museums as "meshworks" of material and social assemblages; how an "archaeological sensibility" might inform approaches to understanding past and present relationships between people, "things," and institutions in relation to museums; and the "weight of things" and sense of "curatorial responsibility," which arises from a reconsideration of the nature of museum objects.
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
