Ivan Karp

Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations

Museum Frictions is the third volume in a bestselling series on culture, society, and museums. The first two volumes in the series, Exhibiting Cultures and Museums and Communities , have become defining books for those interested in the politics of museum display and heritage sites. Another classic in the making, Museum Frictions is a lavishly illustrated examination of the significant and varied effects of the increasingly globalized world on contemporary museum, heritage, and exhibition practice. The contributors—scholars, artists, and curators—present case studies drawn from Africa, Australia, North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Together they offer a multifaceted analysis of the complex roles that national and community museums, museums of art and history, monuments, heritage sites, and theme parks play in creating public cultures. Whether contrasting the transformation of Africa’s oldest museum, the South Africa Museum, with one of its newest, the Lwandle Migrant Labor Museum; offering an interpretation of the audio guide at the Guggenheim Bilbao; reflecting on the relative paucity of art museums in Peru and Cambodia; considering representations of slavery in the United States and Ghana; or meditating on the ramifications of an exhibition of Australian aboriginal art at the Asia Society in New York City, the contributors highlight the frictions, contradictions, and collaborations emerging in museums and heritage sites around the world. The volume opens with an extensive introductory essay by Ivan Karp and Corinne A. Kratz, leading scholars in museum and heritage studies. Contributors. Tony Bennett, David Bunn, Gustavo Buntinx, Cuauhtemoc Camarena, Andrea Fraser, Martin Hall, Ivan Karp, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Corinne A. Kratz, Christine Mullen Kreamer, Joseph Masco, Teresa Morales, Howard Morphy, Ingrid Muan, Fred Myers, Ciraj Rassool, Vicente Razo, Fath Davis Ruffins, Lynn Szwaja, Krista A. Thompson, Leslie Witz, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto

The Distancing of Emotion in Ritual [and Comments and Reply]

There is an ambivalence toward ritual in social science. On the one hand, it is seen as immensely valuable to the individual and to society. On the other hand, there is an underlying feeling that ritual is impotent. This paper presents a theory of the distancing of emotion which integrates the positive and negative orientations toward ritual. The theory links ritual to the process of catharsis of repressed emotion, which subsumes the positive orientation. The theory also suggests that when ritual is either over- or underdistanced, it will be seen either as meaningless, in the case of overdistancing, or tension-producing, in the case of underdistancing, which subsumes the negative orientation toward ritual. The relationship between this theory and Freud and Breuers theory of repression and catharsis is described. Finally, some evidence from ethnology is reviewed which relates sense of well-being, distancing, and catharsis in funeral rites and in curing rituals.

Personhood and Agency: The Experience of Self and Other in African Cultures

Personhood and agency : the experience of self and other in African cultures : papers presented at a symposium on African folk models and their application, held at Uppsala University, August 23-30, 1987

NEW GUINEA MODELS IN THE AFRICAN SAVANNAH

Fourteen years have passed since J. A. Barnes published his short article on ‘African models in the New Guinea Highlands’ (1962). In it Barnes raised the question of whether the concepts used to analyse systems of descent in African societies were applicable to descent systems in New Guinea that appeared at first glance to be similar. This article signalled the beginning of a debate over the nature of descent and kinship in New Guinea and the advisability of using concepts and results derived from field research in another continent and in a different context. The very status of social anthropology as a comparative and generalizing science is called into question by the debate initiated by Barnes, for if African research has no relevance for New Guinea research, then neither cross-cultural typologies nor generalizations about social behavior are possible. Hence, the New Guinea literature has more than just an area specialists significance.

Public Scholarship as a Vocation.

The calling of public scholarship is inherently multifaceted, and often inherently controversial; public scholars have to accommodate different spheres of society, different cultural values and goods, and even different political agendas in their work. Unlike academic workers, public scholars rarely have the opportunity to do work that is driven primarily by intellectual agendas, yet they also have to sustain fidelity to the ideas, values and standards of the disciplines they practice – even when sustaining fidelity means criticizing the most cherished tenets of the disciplines themselves. To be successful, public scholarship must be animated by a pluralist conception of society, a vision of the social world that recognizes that all of us live among different and incompatible cultures and that even the cultures we claim as our own have incommensurate and incompatible standards.

On Rereading The Nuer

according to the ISI brochure, is also an important objective. Toward the end of the article he himself seems to recognise this limitation, warning readers to be cautious in assessing the quality of the publication from these quantitative data. Given the extensive resources and strength of the ISI organisation, I think that only a little more ingenuity would be needed to develop an analysis that would indicate better than it does now the quality of articles. Of course, the real quality of an article can be assessed only after reading it, but to the extent that quality is reflected in its interrelationships with various factors, some indication might be possible if additional analyses were performed. One such analysis might be by grouping the citation crossreferences to produce various indexes, such as impact, etc., for geographical or cultural areas. Inasmuch as anthropology and its subject matter-man in his environment-are highly sensitive to the culture (which may more or less correspond to one or more geographical areas), it is only natural for an article from a specific ultural region to refer more to other articles from that region. Analysis without consideration of geographical clusters may lead to distorted findings, for the most-cited journal may not be the one most cited in a particular cultural area even though it may be more useful. Such distribution, therefore, might lead to some useful indications. In the same way, grouping of references according to subject matter might be helpful, for a journal frequently cited for a specific subject may be seldom cited overall or vice versa. Another question is how the core journals are identified. The brochure explains that they are identified by analysing citations. But does this give an indication of the value of each journal published in the discipline? I do not know what the criteria for inclusion in the SSCI are, but the fact that a number of journals are left out which, while they may not meet the ISIs standards, may still be valuable from a qualitative and regional point of view points to the possibility that some important links are missing. Besides the above, I have some reservations about the various indexes, especially those of impact and immediacy. These indexes presuppose that impact is greater the sooner the article is cited, but this is not the case. The impact of a journal does not tell us anything meaningful about the impact of articles contained therein, and even if we assume that a journal becomes meaningful because of its contents, I question the validity of this factor as it stands. The impact (or immediacy) of an article is determined by several factors, such as how soon the journal becomes available to readers of a specific region and whether the article (or journal) has any relevance to research in progress. An overall index assumes identical research environments and availability everywhere-which actually is not the case. All this, however, is not to underrate the extensive search made possible by the ISI or the analyses performed by the author. These comments are offered simply to suggest some possible improvements.

The Museum@@@Shows of Force: Power, Politics, and Ideology in Art Exhibitions@@@Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display@@@Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums

Part 1 The work of art, museum culture, and the futures past - Art and the futures past: museum space resocializing objects silencing objects the frame of criticism the museum candidates. Object time and museum space: self-conscious painting spaces where art can occur. Jasper Johns and the effacing of art: Jasper Johns and museum art flags, alphabet, numerals the painting as its q own collection the site of archaic acts words, numbers, colours - how representation might be done. Sequence, drift, copy, invention: the museum and the vocabulary of sequence, the series, copying as making, drift, designing a place within sequences series and interposition. Frank Stella and the strategy of the series: the order among works patches of history cones and pillars II Spolia and academic art. Part 2 The work of art and the practice of hand-made space - Pins, a table, works of art: model objects the table clock, cosmos, work of art from pocket watch to pins repair and, making pins art objects and the quarrel with mass production the theory of antagonism. Art works and art thoughts: the Calais masterpiece art thoughts - Klee and Pollock artisanal realism. Han-made space: implicit tables industrial still-life the ethos of construction the table as island or world the technological will stages of object life art object and industrial object - parts, works, cover. Humanism of objects.

Fields of Change Among the Iteso of Kenya

1. Introduction2. The Precolonial Political System3. The Emergence of Neighbourhoods4. Changing Patterns of Kinship and Descent5. Kinship Terms and Norms6. The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups7. Akudiet Neighbourhood8. Conclusion