Shreds and Patches

May 8

Call for Nominations: Council for Museum Anthropology (CMA) Awards (2024)

I am eager to share the following call for CMA award nominations. Check it out and nominate the wonderful colleagues in your world. –Jason

Michael M. Ames Award

The Council for Museum Anthropology is seeking nominations for the Michael M. Ames Award for Innovative Museum Anthropology. The award is given to individuals for an innovative project in museum anthropology. Examples include: outstanding single or multi-authored books or published catalogues; temporary or permanent exhibits; repatriation projects; collaborations with descendant communities; educational or outreach projects; multimedia works, and other endeavors. Individuals can be nominated by any member of CMA (self-nominations are not permitted). Deadline for submissions is August 1, 2024.

For more information on the Michael M. Ames Award and other CMA awards, visit our website: https://museumanthropology.org/awards/nominations-and-applications/

Lifetime Achievement/ Distinguished Service Award

The Council for Museum Anthropology is seeking nominations for the Lifetime Achievement/Distinguished Service Award. The award recognizes CMA members whose careers demonstrate extraordinary achievements that have advanced museum anthropology. These achievements might include: collections work, community collaborations, exhibitions, publications, public programming and outreach, teaching, policy development, etc. While many anthropologists distinguish themselves through their works, this award is meant to single out those who, over the course of their careers, have truly helped to define and or reshape the field of anthropology in and of museums. Nominees are expected to have spent at least 20 years working in the field of museum anthropology. Deadline for submissions is August 1, 2024.

Please note that the Lifetime Achievement/Distinguished Service award was awarded in 2023 and is usually done on a biannual basis. Nominations may be carried over and considered for an award in 2025.

For more information on the Lifetime Achievement/Distinguished Service Award and other CMA awards, visit our website: https://museumanthropology.org/awards/nominations-and-applications/

CMA Student Travel Award

The Council for Museum Anthropology is seeking applications for the CMA Student Travel Award. The award is designed to support graduate student travel to the annual AAA meeting to present papers and/or posters. Students and recent graduate degree recipients (those who have defended within the year of the award) are eligible to apply. Each year, CMA will award two prizes of $1000 each. The deadline for submissions is August 1, 2024.

For more information on the CMA Student Travel Award Award and other CMA awards, visit our website: https://museumanthropology.org/awards/nominations-and-applications/

Museum Anthropology Book Award

The Council for Museum Anthropology is seeking nominations for the CMA Book Award. The award was created to recognize and promote excellence in museum anthropology, and is awarded to a scholar within the field of museum anthropology for a solo, co- or multi-authored book published up to five years prior to the award date, and will be considered for the award 2 years after nomination. Edited books will not be considered. The CMA Book award will be given to the author(s) whose work is judged to be a significant and influential contribution to museum anthropology. Books that did not receive the award but are considered exceptional will receive honorable mentions at the award ceremony at the AAA Annual Meeting.

For more information on the Michael M. Ames Award and other CMA awards, visit our website: https://museumanthropology.org/awards/nominations-and-applications/

19th century designer, socialist, craft theorist, and material culture scholar William Morris (1834-1896).

May 7

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Highland Peoples of Southwest China/Southeast Asia/Northeast India: Spring 2024

During a semester (and a year, and a period) filled with woe, my graduate course was one of the most meaningful and rich educational experiences of my career. I jumped with my students into a deep and unfamiliar pool. Thankfully they were excellent swimmers, and everything turned out better-than-well.

For the past ten years I have been trying to learn the scholarly literature related to the mountain-dwelling peoples of Southwest China. More recently, that quest has expanded into concern for the peoples living in similar geographic and social circumstances in the uplands of Southeast Asia, Northeast India, and (not reflected in my course title), upland Bangladesh. I was not trained for work related to this large and complex region and I will never be a specialist, but my knowledge is growing, and the study is very meaningful and gratifying. Working with students—who are becoming specialists in this region—I took the plunge and offered a course to help them and to help myself grow in our knowledge. I am happy to note that that choice was richly rewarding.

The course, offered under the variable title “Highland Peoples of Southwest China/Southeast Asia/Northeast India” (FOLK-F 600 Asian Folklore / ANTH-E 600 Seminar in Cultural and Social Anthropology), gathered in more students that I had expected. I knew that there were enough students eager from the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, but the students from other departments, whom I did not previously know, contributed greatly to the success of the course, just as the folklore studies students whom I knew did.

The main reason that the course succeeded was the knowledge and enthusiasm brought to the course by the students, but a few other factors were also key. One of these was the participation of outstanding guest visitors: Jessica Anderson Turner (American Folklore Society), Mark Bender (The Ohio State University), Patawee Promsen (Naresuan University), Lijun Zhang (George Mason University), and Suvi Rautio (University of Helsinki). I greatly appreciate the contributions that these wonderful specialist colleagues made to our discussions and growth in the course. Another factor that worked well and that I highlight is the series workshops that I sprinkled across the course. In these, the course participants (myself usually included), researched and presented on new-to-us ideas, issues, and research writings of relevance to the course. These presentations were consistently excellent and greatly expanded my (/our) understanding of this vast region, including its peoples and their circumstances. Finally, and this is more familiar, but none-the-less relevant, the readings that we engaged with were excellent.

I will always remember this course. It now sits alongside the first instance of my graduate course on cultural heritage and cultural property (then [2004] variably titled Contesting Culture as Property). Like that course in that moment, this one taught me so much and approached what I think of as the ideal for a graduate seminar. As I research and write, and as I advise and collaborate, I will be constantly drawing upon the work that these students and I pursued together. I am profoundly thankful for their participation in a joint learning effort.

A sunset in Weishan Yi and Hui Autonomous County, China.

May 6

Museum Practice in Folklore Studies (a.k.a. Museum Methods): Spring 2024

There are too many things needing to be written about. Many of them are grim. Here I want to begin the work week with positivity.

This past semester, I taught one wholly new graduate course and one substantively new undergraduate course. I do not yet have confirmation from course evaluations, but I think that they both turned out well. I will discuss the graduate course separately. The undergraduate course, which covered material that is very familiar to me, was FOLK-F 406 Museum Practice in Folklore Studies (a.k.a. ANTH-A 405 Museum Methods). ANTH-A 405 has been on the books for decades but has been very rarely offered. The parallel course in FOLK was created by me prior to the pandemic, but it was only this semester that I could offer first it. This course was thus substantively new, although I drew in presenting it on past museums courses that I have taught.

As I taught these two courses jointly, I was very pleased that the two sections (ANTH and FOLK) attracted equal numbers of students. Many the participants were major or minor students in both departments, thus they—like me—have a foot in both fields and an interest in their points of intersection. Museum ethnography is one of those points of intersection. This class met no general education requirements. Students were there because they wanted to learn the material and that made for a wonderful course. In twenty years on the Indiana University faculty, I have never taught a course that was comprised mainly of majors or minors in my fields. What a joy that was! Even the students distracted by the end of their senior year and their rapidly approaching graduation, were a pleasure to engage with each week. It is gratifying that a significant proportion of the students in the course were already gaining museum experiences in concurrent museum practicum and that many are now moving on to further work in museums or in museums-related graduate programs.

As I got acquainted with the students and rose to their level, the course changed as it went. As planned, the course included museum work basics and independent research with museum collections objects, but the final course session on critical practices in museum work and museum studies shifted considerably. The topics planned remained the same, but my method moved from lecture and lecture-discussion to freer discussion of key news stories about important or exemplary developments in the present-day museum work. Many of these came from the New York Times, which has been doing particularly good work related to museums in recent months. These were in areas such as repatriation and restoration, digital practices, heritage politics, museum censorship, the finances of museums, community consultation, museum audiences/visitorship, and museums and social change. It was a pleasure to discuss and debate the big issues with these students. They arrived in the course ready and able to engage and were nearly all eager to do so. I am proud of them and thankful for the opportunity to study and learn with them. I wish all of them well and I congratulate the graduating seniors among them.

A heuristic for assessing temporary exhibitions in museums relative to the place of museum collections within them, the relevance to institutional mission, and the role of research within the exhibition.

Apr 25

University of Texas at Austin

Images via UT colleagues.

Apr 22

Shuikou Town

Shuikou, Liping County, Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou, China.

Visited July 10, 2019

This is the Twentieth post in the series: Villages and Towns of the Southeast Asian Massif.

Approximately: 25° 54′ 31.7514″ N, 109° 19′ 7.5354″ E

Apr 21

Education Requirements and Museum Jobs (April 2024)

This week in my undergraduate museum practices course, we will discuss museum careers (and graduate school). For the first time since 2017, I have again done my calculations based on the AAM (American Alliance of Museums) job ads currently posted (N=140). The big story is the rise of the “no degree requirements listed ad.” This can be for the hourly gift shop staff job, but very prominently it is also for the $200,000+ director job. Also in the mix to some degree is the move by governments to drop degree requirements. All that noted, the basic trends remain roughly the same, with the bachelor’s degree being expected for the full breadth of jobs and the master’s degree being valued in domains where one would expect this (collections-related, exhibitions content-related, education-related, accounting). The doctorate in education seems to be showing up in education leadership roles and the Ph.D. remains key for research-intensive and well-known curatorial programs (but the master’s is by far the more common curatorial degree).

No Education Requirement Stated (12%); High School Diploma Required (1%); High School Diploma Required, Bachelor’s Degree Preferred (1%); Associate’s or Bachelor’s Degree Required (1%); Bachelor’s Degree Required (44%); Bachelor’s Degree Required, Master’s Degree Preferred (16%); Master’s Degree Required (13%); Master’s Degree Required, Doctoral Degree Preferred (11%); Doctoral Degree Required (1%).

Apr 12

Luoxiang Town

Luoxiang Town, Congjiang County, Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou, China.

Visited July 8, 2019

This is the Nineteenth post in the series: Villages and Towns of the Southeast Asian Massif.

Approximately: 25° 54′ 42.762″ N, 109° 6′ 34.74″ E

Apr 9

Xijiang (Miao) Town

Xijiang (Miao) Town, Leishan County, Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou, China.

Visited December 11-12, 2014.

This is the eighteenth post in the series: Villages and Towns of the Southeast Asian Massif.

Approximately: 26° 29′ 37.1754″ N, 108° 10′ 23.664″ E

Apr 5

Defeng (Dong) Village

Defeng [Dong Administrative] Village, Leidong Yao and Shui Ethnic Township, Liping County, Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou, China.

Visited July 8-9, 2019.

This is the seventeenth post in the series: Villages and Towns of the Southeast Asian Massif.

Approximately: 25° 55′ 54.708″ N, 109° 24′ 0.252″ E

Apr 4

Caiyanghe Village

Caiyanghe [Natural] Village, Manazhuang [Administrative] Village, Mengyang Town, Jinghong [County-Level] City, Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China.

Visited December 24, 2023.

This is the sixteenth post in the series: Villages and Towns of the Southeast Asian Massif.