{"title":"Nationalism and internationalism on the borders: The West China Union University Museum of Art, Archaeology and Ethnology (1914–51)","authors":"Andrés Rodríguez","doi":"10.1080/19369816.2016.1183103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19369816.2016.1183103","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper examines the role played by the missionary West China Union University Museum of Art, Archaeology and Ethnology in shaping notions of nationalism and internationalism in China's southwest. Located in Chengdu, a place of multiethnic and global encounters on China's borderlands, this paper argues that the West China Museum was at the forefront of global efforts surrounding the development of museums which sought to advance scholarly research and education for citizens of both China and the world. Although nationalism and internationalism converged in the museum's displays and exhibitions, such a process was not without tensions. As Christianity faced the challenge of rising Chinese nationalism during this period, the missionary museum and its curators played a pivotal role in mediating the demands of both sides by engaging with local communities and the extensive use of their transnational networks.","PeriodicalId":52057,"journal":{"name":"Museum History Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/19369816.2016.1183103","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59941500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Miles apart: the India display at the Great Exhibition","authors":"Priti Joshi","doi":"10.1080/19369816.2016.1183101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19369816.2016.1183101","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Who was responsible for assembling the India exhibit of the 1851 Great Exhibition in London? John Forbes Royle has typically been credited — or charged — with organizing the exhibit. This paper draws on the official Exhibition archive as well as the untapped resource of Bengal newspapers to examine the extent of Royle's role in the organization of the exhibit from London and to probe who, if any, his coadjutors in India were. The findings allow us to take a more accurate measure of the relations and interests that operated in assembling the display, as well as some of the ways in which the exhibit exceeded its planners' intentions.","PeriodicalId":52057,"journal":{"name":"Museum History Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/19369816.2016.1183101","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59940800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Brazilian Ark: The Museum of the Instituto Geográfico e Histórico da Bahia (1894–1927)","authors":"S. Cerávolo","doi":"10.1080/19369816.2015.1118254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118254","url":null,"abstract":"The Instituto Geográfico e Histórico da Bahia (IGHB — Geographical and Historical Institute of Bahia), was founded in 1894 in the north-east of Brazil. Its collection was amassed through donations from members and other interested parties, and the museum was comprised of a regional fauna section and a natural products exhibit. The objective of this Institute was to become a research centre, equating Bahia with modernizing republican initiatives and ideals of civilization. This article evaluates the contribution of collective donation with analysis of the survey results from the donation lists published in the Institute's periodical from 1894 to 1927. Although the plans were to create a museum structured like a natural history museum similar to the Rio de Janeiro National Museum, the donation of objects established an eclectic collection that represented the history of Bahia in its specificities. The Institute's emergent acquisition strategy led to the museum becoming something like a centre of regional significance with regional heroes building the path to good citizenship. Natural history, in this civic environment, was relegated to second place.","PeriodicalId":52057,"journal":{"name":"Museum History Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118254","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59940272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Aesthetic Artefacts or Documents? Museums of Art and History in Late Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires","authors":"Laura Malosetti Costa","doi":"10.1080/19369816.2015.1118260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118260","url":null,"abstract":"Argentina's National Museum of History and the National Museum of Fine Arts were created almost at the same time in Buenos Aires, towards the end of the nineteenth century. Many of the artefacts collected in both museums are of the same kind: oil paintings, drawings, engravings, and sculptures, depicting battles, portraits, landscapes, and costumbrista scenes. However, the artefacts in each institution were understood differently: those in the Museum of Fine Arts were considered as ‘art’, while those in the other museum were seen as historical documents. This differentiation between the material of art history and that of history deserves critical examination. The creation of each museum may explain this distinction, as well as offering a point of departure for further reflections about the way in which those artefacts have been exhibited, studied, and preserved.","PeriodicalId":52057,"journal":{"name":"Museum History Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118260","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59940320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Natural History Museums in Argentina, 1862–1906","authors":"Máximo Farro","doi":"10.1080/19369816.2015.1118257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118257","url":null,"abstract":"Natural history museums in Argentina during the last third of the nineteenth century have usually been regarded as pivotal institutions in the survey and exhibition of the national territory and, by extension, as disseminators of cohesive civic representations in the context of ‘nation building’. Departing from the idea of museums as material spaces in which scientific, concrete practices around collections take place, in this essay we propose a more nuanced picture that shows labile and changing ties between natural history museums and the state during the period. To this end, we consider the crafting of collections, exhibitions, policies of access and use developed at the Museo Público de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (later Museo Nacional de Buenos Aires) and the Museo General de La Plata.","PeriodicalId":52057,"journal":{"name":"Museum History Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118257","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59940153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Creation of the National Museum of Colombia (1823–1830): A History of Collections, Collectors, and Museums","authors":"María Paola Rodríguez-Prada","doi":"10.1080/19369816.2015.1118261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118261","url":null,"abstract":"The National Museum of Colombia was inaugurated on 4 July 1824. This museum was created along with a mining school in a post-revolutionary political context during the wars of independence. Museums in South America created in the early nineteenth century are seen as state formulations embedded in nationalist rhetoric conceived within the newborn states. This paper argues against such postulates through a global scientific-geopolitics perspective. It focuses on the analysis of a broad circulation of knowledge, scientific practices, and individuals between Europe and some of the young Latin American republics. Institutional material and immaterial traces that survive today, such as scientific study collections, suggest the relevance of both individual particulars and official purposes for a museum in which the private and the public spheres converge in a scientific agenda of global character.","PeriodicalId":52057,"journal":{"name":"Museum History Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118261","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59940740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Just and Patriotic: Creating a National Museum in Guatemala (1831–1930)","authors":"Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos","doi":"10.1080/19369816.2015.1118255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118255","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces a century of efforts to create a National Museum in Guatemala City. Political instability and natural disasters thwarted these efforts, which nevertheless formed a significant chapter in the country's museum history. The contents of the laws and decrees that ordered the formation of museums provide indications about their political context and aims, while travellers’ reports and museum publications provide a hint at the collections and exhibitions of the first and second national museums, which functioned at the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País (1866–1881) and the Palacio de La Reforma (1898–1917). In addition to local politics, both the country's participation in international expositions and foreign involvement in archaeological research and collecting played a role in museum formation and demise. Special attention is given to the laws and initiatives of the 1920s, which led to the opening of a National Museum in 1930, with a critique of previous work on this important period of Guatemalan museum history.","PeriodicalId":52057,"journal":{"name":"Museum History Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118255","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59940332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The National Museum of Mexico: 1825–1867","authors":"Miruna Achim","doi":"10.1080/19369816.2015.1118252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118252","url":null,"abstract":"The history of the National Museum of Mexico during the first half century after its foundation in 1825 has been largely ignored. This is partly because at that time the museum failed to meet contemporary ideals of national museums as repositories of a nation's most representative objects and as forgers of meanings about these objects. This essay argues against reading intrinsic values into the early National Museum of Mexico and proposes paths for reconstructing its history as an emerging entity. Focusing on the Museum's strategies for collecting, exhibiting, and studying objects, I suggest that, rather than following pre-established protocols, the Museum took shape in practice, in the context of volatile national politics, material limitations, and international competition for collections.","PeriodicalId":52057,"journal":{"name":"Museum History Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118252","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59939746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Diego Amorim Grola, Paula Carolina de Andrade Carvalho, Heloisa Barbuy
{"title":"Nurturing Collecting and the Trade in Objects: The Formation of the Museu Paulista, 1850s–1910s","authors":"Diego Amorim Grola, Paula Carolina de Andrade Carvalho, Heloisa Barbuy","doi":"10.1080/19369816.2015.1118253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118253","url":null,"abstract":"Established in 1893 in the city of São Paulo, the Paulista Museum was the first public museum in the state of São Paulo, and Brazil's fourth museum. It was created as a governmental initiative amidst the growing participation of São Paulo in the international trade market through coffee exports. This article analyses the establishment of the Paulista Museum as an important agent in national and international networks of hunters, collectors, and merchants of natural history specimens in the first decades of its existence.","PeriodicalId":52057,"journal":{"name":"Museum History Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118253","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59940205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Museum in the Heart of Amazonia: One Man's Laboratory","authors":"Maria Margaret Lopes, Magali Romero Sá","doi":"10.1080/19369816.2015.1118259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118259","url":null,"abstract":"The Amazon Botanical Museum — Museu Botânico do Amazonas — opened in 1883 and closed in 1890. Despite its brief life, the Museum was the first scientific institution in the Amazon Province of Brazil. Directed by the Brazilian botanist João Barbosa Rodrigues, the Museum aimed to be a modern institution similar to natural history museums in Europe and the United States. In addition to taxonomic studies of botanical and ethnographic collections collected in the Amazon region, the Museum also intended to develop studies in applied botany in medicine and industry. This article explores some aspects of the history of the Botanical Museum and examines the importance of Barbosa Rodrigues’ individual agency in the Museum's organization and studies of the Brazilian Amazon. It also demonstrates that the Museum was fundamental to improving Barbosa Rodrigues’ career as a botanist and ethnographer in the context of emerging Brazilian scientific communities of the period.","PeriodicalId":52057,"journal":{"name":"Museum History Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/19369816.2015.1118259","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59940294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}