Collecting Contemporary Urban Culture: An Emerging Framework for the Field Museum

Abstract

The article discusses a process and protocol for adding contemporary urban material culture to the Field Museum. The Field Museum is a natural history museum with significant anthropology collections that has experimented with exhibiting contemporary cultural themes but lacks a significant collection in this area. I argue that urban lifeways are an important area for collecting work and that building such a collection should be done within the parameters of anthropological theorizing on social life, material culture, and the urban context. [collections protocols, urban material culture, Field Museum]

The Shipibo-Conibo: Culture and Collections in Context

“…Village life is characterized by patterns common throughout Amazonia: families tend to their plots of land (to which they have use rights) or engage in other subsistence activities, such as hunting, fishing, and foraging; women devote time to making handcrafts late in the afternoon and early evening; and collective work parties (called min gas using the Quechua word) are organized on an as-needed basis (to build a house or clear a field) or for regular communal work, such as cleaning the village green. Village political structure conforms to the national norm instituted in the 1970s when Peru passed legislation governing the titling of indigenous peoples' land in the Amazon (Wali, 2012). Generally, Amazonian villages elect a council with between six and eight officeholders (president, vice president, treasurer, judicial officer) and indigenous villages have an additional office of apu (also a Quechua word), or "chief," considered a traditional authority figure.…”

“…We understood the need in the communities to generate income, but we wanted the income generation to be only one part of a broader effort to strengthen cultural practices and natural resource management. We also wanted to create long-term stability for existing structures/institutions that were part of the governance structure of indigenous representation in the national arena: the local Federations that were affiliated with two major national indigenous organizations: the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest and CONAP (for a fuller description of these organizations, see Wali, 2012).…”