university of cambridge abstract Museums have increasingly been promoting their postcolonial status through inclusionist programs in exhibitions, shared curatorship, and use of collections. Where there are indigenous stakeholders, we have seen an unprecedented improvement in the empowerment of source communities in the management, use, and presentation of their patrimony in museums. Since James Clifford's 1997 essay, the phrase ''contact zone'' is now more or less synonymous with these inclusionist, collaborative programs. This paper, while being openly supportive of such collaborations in museums, is nevertheless critical of the use of the contact zone concept. Returning to Clifford's essay, as well as those of Pratt and others, this paper questions why museum scholars perpetuate only a partial portrait of the contact zone, despite clear warnings about its inherent asymmetry. The goal of this paper is not to undermine the ethically engaged work that has been done, but to expose the dark underbelly of the contact zone and, hence, the anatomy of the museum that seems to be persistently neocolonial. [neocolonialism, postcolonialism, museum studies, contact zones, local knowledge] museum anthropology
As museums begin to revisit their definition of ‘‘expert’’ in light of theories about the local character of knowledge, questions emerge about how museums can reconsider their documentation of knowledge about objects. How can a museum present different and possibly conflicting perspectives in such a way that the tension between them is preserved? This article expands upon a collaborative research project between the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Cambridge University, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center to compare descriptions of museum objects by multiple expert communities. We found that narratives and objects in use are key omissions in traditional museum documentation, offering us several possibilities to expand our concept of digital objects. Digital objects will allow members of indigenous source communities to contribute descriptive information about objects to support local cultural revitalization efforts and also to influence how objects are represented in distant cultural institutions.
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