Liberal Government and the Practical History of Anthropology

Beyond “Natural” and “Cultural” Heritage: Toward an Ontological Politics of Heritage in the Age of Anthropocene

“…In doing so, heritage functions to normalize and historicize inequalities of many kinds. I am mindful here of the ways in which heritage, like culture, has come to function as what Michel Foucault terms a "transactional reality" (see Bennett 2014;Bennett et al 2014) for the purposes of identifying specific threats, specific endangered objects, specific ways of managing those threats, and specific models of ownership and regimes of expertise that underpin them. Like the culture concept (Bennett 2013), heritage almost always functions toward the differentiation of populations for the purposes of administration and government.…”

‘A selection of minor antiquities’: a multi-sited view on collections from excavations in Egypt

“…In addressing such intricacies this study benefits from several decades of scholarship that has emerged from conceptions of object biographies (Appadurai 1986;Gosden and Marshall 1999), which emphasise the shifting value of artefacts throughout their life-courses. The concept, together with aspects of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), has had particular currency in museum studies, where it has highlighted the manner in which museums operate within wide-ranging socio-material networks (Gosden and Knowles 2001;Alberti 2005;Bennett 2014), most notably in the model of the 'relational museum' (Gosden and Larson 2007). The 'Artefacts of Excavation' project, which is funded by the UK's Arts and Heritage Research Council (AHRC), is similarly informed by enquiries into the relational links between the field and the museum, which are contingent upon constantly fluctuating social, political, economic and intellectual conditions (Livingstone 2003;Hill 2006;Bennett 2014).…”

Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities

“…However, read collectively, the papers also constitute an attempt to disconnect arguments about "the practical history of anthropology" from the assumption that the relationship between anthropology and governmentality can only be identified under circumstances where there is a direct or identifiable impact on the administrative practices of the state. Of course there are a number of instances where this can be demonstrated (see Dibley 2014, for example), but arguments about governmentality have a broader orientation: that of the respects in which knowledge practices provide means of acting on populations and individuals on the part of experts whose relations to state administrative practices might take many forms-as parts of administrative bureaus, or as agents outside such bureaus whose activities nonetheless impinge on and effect in various ways the discourses and apparatuses which such bureaus employ in conceptualizing, organizing, and legitimizing their practices (see Bennett 2014;Harrison 2014). Tony Bennett's formulations on the role played by the post-Boasian concept of culture in providing a "working surface on the social" offer a useful example.…”

“…Indeed, anthropology's distinctive contribution to processes of governing has consisted precisely in the variability of the conduits it has organized for acting on populations. Boasian "culture" provides one strong example of this (Bennett 2014), but contributors to the special issue identify a number of other transactional realities which served to mediate relations of governmentality: "the dying native" (Rowse 2014), "native culture" (Dibley 2014), and "morale" (Harrison 2014) are all examples of entities that have emerged to work this interface.…”