Museums and Source Communities A Routledge Reader

This book brings together hitherto uncollected work on one of the most important developments in museology in the past century: collaborative research involving museums and members of ethnographic source communities, and the development of a new curatorial praxis which incorporates source community needs and perspectives. Using case studies of research projects as well as overview essays exploring the issues, common problems, and lessons of this type of research, this book will provide the first overview of work in this emerging field.

This volume combines some of the most influential published research in this emerging field with newly commissioned essays on the issues, problems and lessons involved in collaborating museums and source communities. Focusing on museums in the UK, North America and the Pacific, the book highlights three areas which demonstrate the new developments most clearly: the museum as field site or 'contact zone' - a place which source community members enter for purposes of consultation and collaboration visual repatriation - the use of photography to return images of ancestors, historical moments and material heritage to source communities exhibition case studies - these are discussed to reveal the implications of cross-cultural and collaborative research for museums, and how such projects have challenged established attitudes and practices. As the first overview of its kind, this collection will be essential reading for museum staff working with source communities, for community members involved with museum programmes, and for students and academics in museum studies and social anthropology.

Part 1: Museums and Contact Work Section Introduction 1. Yup'ik Elders in Museums: Fieldwork Turned on its Head 2. The Object in View: Aborigines, Melanesians and Museums 3. The Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms: Collaborating with a Community and 4. Integrating Native Views into Museum Procedures: Hope and Practice at the National Museum of the American Indian Part 2: Talking Visual Histories Section Introduction 5. Taking Photographs Home: The Recovery of Maori History 6. Looking to See: Reflections on Visual Repatriation in the Purari Delta, Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea 7. Remembering our Namesakes: Audience Reactions to Archival Film of King Island, Alaska 8. Snapshots on Dreaming: Photographs of the Past and Present Part 3: Community Collaboration in Exhibitions Section Introduction 9. How to Decorate a House: The Re-Negotiation of Cultural Representations at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology 10. Curating 11. Objects, Agency and Museums: Continuing Dialogues Between the Torres Straits and Cambridge 12. Transforming Archaeology Through Practice: Strategies for Collaborative Archaeology and the Community Archaeology Project at Quseir, Egypt 13. Glenbow's Blackfoot Gallery: Working Towards Coexistence Afterword: Beyond the Frame

Laura Peers is Curator for the Americas collections, Pitt Rivers Museum, Lecturer in the School of Anthropology, and Fellow, Linacre College, at the University of Oxford. She has published on First nations cultural history.Alison K. Brown is Research Manager (Human History) for Glasgow Museums. She has worked with First Nations communitites in Western Canada, and has published on collecting histories and contemporary museum practice.