Teaching Collections Management Anthropologically

Abstract

This article documents the creation of a teaching collection intended to teach and equally interrogate collections management practices and values to graduate-level museum studies students. The collection is being used to convey to students the ways collections management is an embodied practice and an active area for research. The creation of the collection is discussed as an iterative process through the lens of material culture and museum anthropological analysis, taking into account the objects in the collection, the practices of collections management, and the interactions between students and the growing collection. The iterative process is likewise presented in waves of challenges and partial solutions. [collections management, material culture, museum anthropology] My background is in museum anthropology and material culture studies. I now teach within a Museum Studies professional master's program at the University of Toronto that takes seriously the interrelatedness of practice and theory and aims to create students who are "fluent" across multiple museum roles. The students come from diverse disciplines including history, archaeology, classics, biology, literature, art history, and anthropology, while others are returning to university from professional positions within museums, galleries, zoos, education, contract archaeology, communications, translation, or other fields. Among the courses I teach is Collections Management, a required course that introduces students to the processes that transform objects into museum artifacts and the long-term physical and intellectual care of museum collections. I strive for students to be keenly aware of the people for whom museums steward collections and the people who are affected by collections management decisions. Within my course, I also want students to understand collections management as a site for active research within museums and museum studies. The course requires students to expand their knowledge of the theories at the foundation of collections best practices and the resources available to support collections activities. It also provides opportunities for "practice-based learning" so that students' bodies will come to know what it feels like to practice collections management-to embody best and emerging practices through repetitive physical handling of museum artifacts and by monitoring one's bodily movements within museum spaces. Our bodily interactions with museum collections are distinct from our interactions with non-museum objects, and it takes practice and repetition for this manner of working to become "natural." Although my students have various levels of exposure to anthropological methods and theories, anthropology's interest in the relations made through objects and their exchange (Appadurai 1988; Buchli 2002;Edwards et al. 2006;Harrison et al. 2013; Strathern 1988), in isolating cultural epistemologies (Fabian 2007; Moore and Saunders 2014; Toren and de Pina-Cabral 2011), and in embodied and engendered cultural practices (C...

Anthropology and Museums: Notes from a Course in Bahia, Brazil

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American Association for Anatomy recommendations for the management of legacy anatomical collections

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