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Material Culture in Transit: Theory and Practice constellates curators and scholars actively working with material culture within academic and museal institutions through theory and practice. The rich collection of essays critically addresses the multivalent ways in which mobility reshapes the characteristics of artefacts, specifically under prevailing issues of representation and colonial liabilities. The volume attests to material culture as central to understanding the repercussions of problematic histories and proposes novel ways to address them. It offers valuable reading for scholars of anthropology, museum studies, history and others with an interest in material culture.
List of contents
List of figures
Contributors
Preface
Acknowledgements
Moving Matter: Worlds f Material Culture
Zainabu Jallo
Part I Museology Representation and Colonial Liabilities
1. After Interpretive Dominance
Anna Schmid
2. "Wo Ist Afrika?": Of Reflexive Museography, and Other (Productive?) Disappointments
Sandra Ferracuti
3. "Out of Context"- Translocation of West African Artefacts to European Museums: The Case of the Leo Frobenius Collection From Mali
Cécile Bründlmayer
4. The Museum as a Colonial Archive. The Collection of Victor and Marie Solioz and Its Role in Forgetting the Colonial Past
Samuel B. Bachmann
5. Museum Collections in Transit: Towards A History of The Artefacts Of The Endeavour Voyage
Nicholas Thomas
Part II Heuristic Materiality Meanings and Transformations
6. "To Give Away My Collection For Free Would Be Nonsense": Decorations And The Emergence Of Ethnology In Imperial Germany
Carl Deussen
7. Discourse On Objectification And Personification: Modern Forms Of Material Cultural Identity In The Touareg Society
Djouroukoro Diallo
8. The Material Culture Of Vodun: Case Studies From Ghana, Togo, Germany And In-Between
Niklas Wolf
9. Ndambirkus and Ndaokus; Asmat Skulls In Transit
Jan Joris Visser
10. On The Art Of Forging Gods: Techniques, Forces And Materials In An Afro-Brazilian Religion.
Lucas Marques
About the author
Zainabu Jallo is a Post-Doctoral Researcher and lecturer in Anthropology at the Universities of Basel and Bern, Switzerland. Her PhD in Anthropology is from the Institute for Social Anthropology, University of Bern. she is also a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Anthropology at USP - Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. Jallo is one of the Principal Investigators of the" Sacral Architecture Africa" Project. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts England and a member of the UNESCO Coalition of Artists for the General History of Africa. Her scholarly interests include museum anthropology, diaspora studies, iconic criticism, and material culture.
Summary
Material Culture in Transit: Theory and Practice constellates curators and scholars actively working with material culture within academic and museal institutions through theory and practice.
Report
"Material Culture in Transit offers a provocative reflection on the relationship between mobility and materiality, things and their social and historical trajectories. Starting with recent controversial public debates on museum inventories-salient questions on provenance and restitution-the book challenges the relative insularity of some of these debates. A key contribution of this essay collection, as I see it, is that it situates the circulation of museum objects-now at the center of so-called "provenance research"-within broader forms of material culture circulation. It explores what emerges along the paths of circulating things." - George Paul Meiu, University of Basel
