His research concerns cultural and political change at the global and local levels. His case studies include historical change in Guam and Germany, and the work of independent international commissions.
The role of ethnographic museums was. to begin with, that of imparting information about foreign cultures. These were, often enough, described as the polar opposites of the civilized places in which ethnographic museums could be found.The museum objects metaphorically represented primitive stages in human development. They appeared like relics even if produced recently. Anthropology, ethnography, or ethnology was the academic discipline which concerned itself with primitive cultures. The ethnographic museum with its harvests of colonial booty therefore seemed like the self-evident medium for conveying anthropological information. Today the preconditions for this constellation have changed. Have museums become inappropriate to communicate anthropological knowledge?KEYWORDS Museums, exhibition strategy, temporality, scientific popularization W hereas anthropology as an academic discipline to an increasing degree defines all human social and cultural life as falling within its domain of research, the definition of what counts as relevant to show in an ethnographic museum remains more constrained. Once a museum was either the self-glorifying institution of national romanticism seeking the roots ofthe nation in an idealized rural background, or an exoticizing museum depicting the colonial other. In territories where indigenous peoples were subjected to European conquest these two categories are today often muddled, signaling new relations between nation-building and indigenousness. Rather than indigenousness being excluded from the imagery of the nation, the two interact in a complex way. Because of its connotations of natural and localized roots, indigenousness offers resources of identity that can be capitalized by the state. As implied by Kelly in this volume, origin and naturalness are still the core themes ofthe ethnographic museum, also shapETHNos, VOL. 65:2 2000 (pp. 157-171)
This special issue of Global Networks is devoted to the work of Ulf Hannerz, whose research in urban anthropology, media anthropology, and transnational cultural processes has established his international reputation.1 Over the years, this reputation has earned him many distinctions -he is, for example, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, former Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and anthropology editor for the new International Enyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Such honours, however, never led to complacence. There has been a steady stream of publications and a continuous series of research projects. Most recently, Hannerz not only completed a study of the work of news media foreign correspondents, which included field research that took him to four continents, he has already started a new research project about the cultural and political dimensions of cosmopolitanism. All this attests to some measure of curiosity and resolve.
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