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Sep 25

Tragic Foolishness at the Penn Museum

On her new blog, Dr. Louise Krasniewicz provides a massively discouraging account of the foolishness that has been going on at one of the country’s great university anthropology museums, the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania.  Its ETHNOGRAPHIC collections are priceless and it has a very long and very distinguished history of scholarship in ETHNOGRAPHY and ETHNOLOGY (even in LINGUISTICS–see Sapir’s work there), not just old world archaeology.  Dr. Krasniewicz describes the liquidation of cultural anthropology by the museum’s director, a move that is not only out of sync with good sense but out of sync with cutting edge archaeology, even cutting edge classical archaeology (as evidenced by the renewal of multi-method, multi-disciplinary material culture studies). The only hope that I can find is in the history of the museum’s names.  Deleting “anthropology” from the name need not last for ever. Of all the museums that I know, the Penn Museum has carried the most different names at different points in time. It could easily be renamed again two years from now.

I hope that the ethnographic collections will be stewarded responsibly. Ugh.

Sep 15

Compact for Open-Access Publishing

I was quoted in today’s issue of Inside Higher Education in an article dealing with the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity. I offer a bit more of my thinking on this new development at Open Access Anthropology, where Stevan Harnad has already left a comment that can also be found here.

Sep 7

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Museum Anthropology 32(2) and IU Folklore and Ethnomusicology

This past summer, my editorship of Museum Anthropology slowly wound to a stop. I saw tonight that the final issue of my term has now been posted online (behind a toll wall) in Wiley InterScience. It should thus appear in AnthroSource very soon and then it will show up in mailboxes. One of the consistent pleasures of the editorship has been publishing the work of smart and talented colleagues with whom I work here at Indiana University. The final issue 32(2) contains reviews or review essays by several of these friends.

Arle Lommel provided a review essay titled “From Galleries and Catalogues to Websites: Three Online Musical Instrument Exhibitions” (pp. 111-113).

Gabrielle A. Berliner authored two reviews for the issue.  One of the digital exhibition “Keeping the Faith: Judaica from the Aron Museum” (pp. 117-118) and one is of the book Jews and Shoes edited by Edna Nahshon (pp. 152-154).

Teri Klassen reviewed the book Texas Quilts and Quilters: A Lone Star Legacy by Marcia Kaylakie with Janice Whittington (pp. 134-135), while a second quilt book–Contemporary Quilt Art: An Introduction and Guide by Kate Lenkowsky (pp. 160-161) was reviewed by Janice E. Frisch.

Michael Dylan Foster’s contribution to the issue is a review of How to Wrap Five Eggs: Traditional Japanese Packaging by Hideyuki Oka and Michikazu Sakai (pp. 154-155).

An alumnus of our department, Katherine Roberts (now on the faculty of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) reviewed the book Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art edited by Carol Crown and Charles Russell (pp. 122-124).

Finally, a DVD produced by our colleague Jon Kay (who is the director of Traditional Arts Indiana) was reviewed by Chris Goertzen of the University of Southern Mississippi. The film is Crafting Sound: Indiana Instrument Builders and it appear on page 119-120 in the new issue.

Thanks to everyone in (and of) the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology who worked so hard to help Museum Anthropology thrive over the past several years.