Zuni Museum Enlists AMNH in New Digital Collaborative Catalog

Monday, June 06 11:10 am

A delegation of five Zuni representatives visited the American Museum of Natural History recently on an exciting cultural mission—to add the Museum’s substantial ethnographic collection of over 1,700 Zuni artifacts to an innovative digital collaborative catalog created by and for the Zuni people. This collaboration was funded by the National Park Service through a generous grant, which the Museum applied for on the delegation’s behalf.

Representatives from the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center in New Mexico, led by Executive Director Jim Enote, are taking information about Zuni objects from disparate digital collections all over the world and uniting them in a shared platform or database where Zunis can add their own comments and critiques. In addition to the American Museum of Natural History, the database already lists Zuni holdings from the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, England; the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan; and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, to name a few.

“Museums are contact zones for mediating different knowledge systems,” said Enote. “This collaborative catalog retains how objects are identified in the language of museums, but it also adds the voice of the Zuni describing the contextual uses of the same objects and adding personal narratives.” Read more »

Marking Franz Boas’s Birthday

Friday, July 23 4:25 pm

This month marks the 152nd anniversary of the birth of Franz Boas, a prominent Museum curator who is often called the father of American anthropology. During his 10-year tenure at the Museum and later as the first professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Boas established anthropology as a recognized branch of scientific inquiry and debunked prevailing beliefs about the superiority of Western civilization.

Supported by several museums, Boas led research expeditions along the North Pacific Coast of North America and trained a new generation of anthropologists, including future Museum Curator Margaret Mead.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Boas’s birth in 2008, Museum Curator Peter Whiteley – who studies the cultures and histories of Native North America from the 17th century to the present — commemorated this bold pioneer in apaper presented at a colloquium on Engaged and Public Anthropology at the Museum.

Check out a few excerpts below.

On Boas’s early interest in anthropology

“Boas’s attraction to what was to become “anthropology” emerged from a coalescence of interests in physics, mathematics and physical geography, as well
as a deep-rooted family background in social justice… In consequence, Boas’s take on the interpretation of culture was both rigorously
empirical, and assiduously attentive to the discourses and practices of his Native American interlocutors.”

On how Boas transformed anthropology

“Although a few scholars had used the term “culture” in the plural before, it was Boas who truly transformed scientific and, in time, popular understanding by his insistence on individual cultures as opposed to a great, monolithic plod of social evolution from lower to higher forms of culture.”

On Boas’s legacy

“…A paradigm shift in the understanding of human cultures that over time has transformed all global thought on the subject…an explicitly collaborative record of Native American cultural and linguistic forms that in its range and depth is almost incredible…a bottom line commitment to human rights enacted in his own life and practice…[and] a fierce defense of the sanctity of academic freedom to inquire and to speak out as a public intellectual…

Boas’s anthropology, as that of many of his students, notably Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Cara Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, went against the grain of conventional wisdom and conventional practice, to produce a truly liberating discourse celebrating the varieties of the human condition that has now spread to all corners of the globe and multiple forms of social discourse.”