BEING CALLED TO ACTION: Contemporary Museum Ethnographies

Abstract

There has been wonderful work animating vectors of relatedness, negotiation, and collaboration between museums and “source communities”; foregrounding the significance of objects, what they can/might do, and how they act in and through museums; and highlighting the particularity of the photographic archive (and especially photographs as things in need of specific kinds of attention and care) in contemporary cultural reclamation and (re)vitalization projects. In this special issue of Museum Anthropology entitled “Materiality, Belonging, and the Activation of Difference,” we seek to bring these three fields into conversation. We seek to extend recent work arguing for an expanded view of museums as sites of translation (between local needs and global agendas) and frames for more inclusive, dynamic, collaborative, politically informed action. As a set, these articles argue that museum anthropology as a discipline must allow for ethnographic exploration of, coexistence with, and engagement across these emphases: the centrality of objects and how they are mobilized in various forms of knowledge production; debate over what a museum is and what its social role(s) might be (can a home be a museum? Can a city? What happens to our notion of “museum” when we expand beyond architectural objectifications of state/national authority?); and the embodied, affective, and sensorial experiences of museums and museum-like spaces. [museum objects/things, museum places, heritage, tourism, authenticity]