{"title":"TRACING THREADS OF HISTORY: Rediscovering Indonesian Textiles at the Brooklyn Museum","authors":"Meghan Bill","doi":"10.1111/muan.12236","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div>\n \n <p>Choices that admit things to, or omit things from, museum collections rely on institutional and individual assumptions about value, ownership, skill, history, and people. Historical decisions about what was worth collecting, how collections should be organized, who would oversee collections care, and what uses collections could serve reverberate through the years, affecting museums’ abilities to research, exhibit, and engage collections. Using recent research into one Balinese <i>slendang</i> in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, this essay examines how the Museum’s frameworks and curatorial assumptions enabled the neglect of nearly 200 Indonesian textiles for decades. It examines how the Museum parsed collection categories, how Indonesian textiles complicated and confounded those categories, and how the ensuing inattention inadvertently enabled a well-preserved collection. By attempting to weave the textiles’ collecting histories into narratives of their embedded colonial and institutional histories, it hopes to rekindle their usefulness for scholars, for communities, and for the Museum.</p>\n </div>","PeriodicalId":43404,"journal":{"name":"Museum Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7000,"publicationDate":"2021-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Museum Anthropology","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/muan.12236","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Choices that admit things to, or omit things from, museum collections rely on institutional and individual assumptions about value, ownership, skill, history, and people. Historical decisions about what was worth collecting, how collections should be organized, who would oversee collections care, and what uses collections could serve reverberate through the years, affecting museums’ abilities to research, exhibit, and engage collections. Using recent research into one Balinese slendang in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, this essay examines how the Museum’s frameworks and curatorial assumptions enabled the neglect of nearly 200 Indonesian textiles for decades. It examines how the Museum parsed collection categories, how Indonesian textiles complicated and confounded those categories, and how the ensuing inattention inadvertently enabled a well-preserved collection. By attempting to weave the textiles’ collecting histories into narratives of their embedded colonial and institutional histories, it hopes to rekindle their usefulness for scholars, for communities, and for the Museum.
期刊介绍:
Museum Anthropology seeks to be a leading voice for scholarly research on the collection, interpretation, and representation of the material world. Through critical articles, provocative commentaries, and thoughtful reviews, this peer-reviewed journal aspires to cultivate vibrant dialogues that reflect the global and transdisciplinary work of museums. Situated at the intersection of practice and theory, Museum Anthropology advances our knowledge of the ways in which material objects are intertwined with living histories of cultural display, economics, socio-politics, law, memory, ethics, colonialism, conservation, and public education.