Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture (Volume 3)

by George W. Stocking Jr. (Editor)

History of Anthropology is a series of annual volumes, inaugurated in 1983, each of which treats an important theme in the history of anthropological inquiry. Objects and Others , the third volume, focuses on a number of questions relating to the history of museums and material culture the interaction of museum arrangement and anthropological theory; the tension between anthropological research and popular education; the contribution of museum ethnography to aesthetic practice; the relationship of humanistic and anthropological culture, and of ethnic artifact and fine art; and, more generally, the representation of culture in material objects. As the first work to cover the development of museum anthropology since the mid-nineteenth century, it will be of great interest and value not only to anthropologist, museologists, and historians of science and the social sciences, but also to those interested in "primitive"  art and its reception in the Western world.

Genres: Anthropology, Museums, Material Culture, Archaeology

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[Shuhui Shen]

This book includes an informative piece on Pitt Rivers and the ways in which he made sense of his collections. However, as a reader, I found it difficult to follow as there is an awful flow.

[Kristi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume is a selection of essays examining the relationship between museums and the field of anthropology. The editor characterizes museums as object centered institutions, which remove things from time and original context and re-contextualizes these objects into a display, as "artifacts" and "art." The exhibition of objects creates a relationship of "otherness," which is further complicated by the entanglement of museum objects in a rarefied economic system that is distinct from their role as ethnographic objects, as well as new power dynamics, contested ownership, and the construction of nationalism. While the gaze of "otherness" is inherent to the practice of anthropology, the commodification of the "other" as museum object has its own implications for the field of anthropology that can make us also question the political and philosophical implications of exhibition practices.