Cushing as part of the team: the collecting activities of the Smithsonian Institution

Parezo, Nancy J.

doi:10.1525/ae.1985.12.4.02a00120

Cited by 17 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Once an ad hoc process supported by traveling missionaries, militaries, and travelers, the magnitude of collecting and organization at the Smithsonian grew exponentially through the mid-19th century (see Parezo, 1985Parezo, , 1987. Informal collecting practices became increasingly systematized and professionalized through the mid to late 19th century (Gibbs, 1867).…”

Section: Col L Ec Ti Ng At Th E Sm Ithson I a Nmentioning

confidence: 99%

Small collections remembered: Sámi material culture and community‐based digitization at the Smithsonian Institution

Magnani,

Porsanger,

Laiti

et al. 2023

Museum Anthropology

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Of the 158 million things housed by the Smithsonian Institution, about 56 objects originate from Sámi communities. By all accounts a small group of objects—even by the standards of the Arctic collections at the Institution—it may be easily overlooked or dismissed as insignificant, based on entrenched ideologies about idealized collections. Presenting a community‐based methodology for the engagement of distant museum collections using three‐dimensional technologies, this article establishes the latent potential of small collections for Indigenous communities. We demonstrate how a group of 56 objects not only chronicles complex histories of exchange and colonialism, but also provides a manageable conduit for learning and exchange to facilitate the continued restructuring of relationships between museums and descendent stakeholders, from the individual to community level. Small collections, far from incomplete, may not only contain materials significant to descendent groups on their own terms, but provide the grounds to generate new forms of Indigenous initiated, balanced reciprocity.

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Section: Col L Ec Ti Ng At Th E Sm Ithson I a Nmentioning

confidence: 99%

Small collections remembered: Sámi material culture and community‐based digitization at the Smithsonian Institution

Magnani,

Porsanger,

Laiti

et al. 2023

Museum Anthropology

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“…9 This mirrors early anthropological conceptions of authentic Native culture as in isolation, timeless, static, and untouched by nonNative ways of life, denying local agency in responding to changing historical conditions. Clifford (1989) has demonstrated how salvage collecting was, and still is, linked to specific understandings of history and authenticity based on static dichoto mies such as primitive/modern, pure/acculturated, and art/culture (see also Parezo 1985). These conceptualizations of authenticity did not allow for innovation, adaptation, or any type of change of a community's lifeways and material production.…”

Section: Authenticity and Preservationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Architectures of Appropriation

Treier

2022

Museum Worlds

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The Maisons Tropicales are three prefabricated housing structures designed by Jean Prouvé. Fabricated in France, they were transported to and assembled in Brazzaville and Niamey, then part of the French colonies, around 1950. Their design was tied closely to the belief in the so-called civilizing and enlightening power of European modernist design and, thereby, also the French colonial agenda. In the early 2000s, an American collector, Robert Rubin, and a French art dealer, Eric Touchaleaume, “repatriated” the houses to France. There, they were transformed into and celebrated as icons of French modern design, while their colonial histories were ignored. This article analyzes the importance of discourse in this transformation and how it reflects ongoing dynamics of power and dispossession in the art world. Rubin and Touchaleaume simultaneously employed conflicting narratives mirroring anthropological “salvage” and “repatriation” discourses to describe the Maisons’ removal. The case study highlights the moral weight associated with the language around processes of repatriation, the nested relationships between heritage and the market, and the continuation of colonial practices of dispossession.

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“…Nancy Parezo notes that the Smithsonian's emphasis on systematic documentation was a rule for researchers and collectors and they functioned as standards by which collections were amassed. She argues that these documentation practices were equally as important as the objects, and the objects that had good documentation increased in scientific value [37]. For example, the preponderance and necessity of the fields "locality" and "collector" are desired by each of the early field guides, and the locality in particular was one of the most important pieces of information to attribute to specimens.…”

Section: Data and Value In The History Of Collecting At The Nmnhmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decolonizing Ethnographic Documentation: A Critical History of the Early Museum Catalogs at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History

Turner

2015

Cataloging & Classification Quarterly

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To inform debates about decolonizing museum records, this paper maps the history of cataloging at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when material heritage was collected for museums from Indigenous peoples, the knowledge within those communities was often measured against eurocentric biases that saw Indigenous knowledges as the object of material culture research, not a contribution to it. This paper thus argues for a historical approach to understand how standards in object description involve assumptions that have resulted in a lack of Indigenous knowledge in museum records from this time.

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Cushing as part of the team: the collecting activities of the Smithsonian Institution

Cited by 17 publications

References 5 publications

Small collections remembered: Sámi material culture and community‐based digitization at the Smithsonian Institution

Small collections remembered: Sámi material culture and community‐based digitization at the Smithsonian Institution

Architectures of Appropriation

Decolonizing Ethnographic Documentation: A Critical History of the Early Museum Catalogs at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History

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