Former exhibit, Taiwanese anthropology museum
1 2017-05-15T16:26:32-07:00 Caroline Frank a1a5e7e9a2c3dba76ecb2896a93bf66ac8d1635e 18425 1 "The Rukai are keen on ornamentation and enthusiastic about beautifying themselves," begins the label of a 2014 display. Such an essentializing statement is inappropriate in the omnipotent and paternalistic curatorial voice. I ask if members of all communities of the world don't aspire to beauty? We believe each community represented in museums should be given a voice to express their own particular relationship to their decorative clothing. ~ C. Frank plain 2017-05-15T16:26:32-07:00 Caroline Frank a1a5e7e9a2c3dba76ecb2896a93bf66ac8d1635eThis page is referenced by:
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What is a decolonized museum?
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We believe that anthropology museums must eliminate elitism and return authorship, if not collections, back to source communities. They can move from hallowed national temples to inclusive public forums by first acknowledging their complicity, as a Euro-American institution, in the colonial processes responsible for their collections and objectifying interpretations. The collections and displays in our museums reveal as much about the collectors and the museum staff as about Indigenous peoples, yet the collectors and curators are occluded from view as are the dominant assumptions framing the exhibit narrative. As objects are displayed, who controls the narrative?
According to Amy Lonetree, museums can serve as sites of decolonization by "honoring Indigenous knowledge and worldviews, challenging the stereotypical representations of Native people produced in the past [and present], serving as sites of knowledge making and remembering for their own communities and the public, and discussing the hard truths of colonialism." (Lonetree, 2012, 25)"The key problem, as I see it, lies deeper—deep in the assumptions and practices that constitute the museum in the past and today....The museum as a site of accumulation, as a gatekeeper of authority and expert accounts, as the ultimate caretaker of the object...as its documenter and even as educator, has to be completely redrafted."
-- Robin Boast, archaeologist
Work cited:- Boast, Robin, "Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited," Museum Anthropology 34, no.1, (2011): 67.
- Lonetree, Amy, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
