Short description:

Material Culture in Transit: Theory and Practice constellates curators and scholars actively working with material culture within academic and museal institutions through theory and practice.

Long description:

Material Culture in Transit: Theory and Practice constellates curators and scholars actively working with material culture within academic and museal institutions through theory and practice. The rich collection of essays critically addresses the multivalent ways in which mobility reshapes the?characteristics of artefacts, specifically under prevailing issues of representation and colonial liabilities. The volume attests to material culture as central to understanding the repercussions of problematic histories and proposes novel ways to address them. It offers valuable reading for scholars of anthropology, museum studies, history and others with an interest in material culture.

"Material Culture in Transit offers a provocative reflection on the relationship between mobility and materiality, things and their social and historical trajectories. Starting with recent controversial public debates on museum inventories?salient questions on provenance and restitution?the book challenges the relative insularity of some of these debates. A key contribution of this essay collection, as I see it, is that it situates the circulation of museum objects?now at the center of so-called ?provenance research??within broader forms of material culture circulation. It explores what emerges along the paths of circulating things." - George Paul Meiu, University of Basel

Table of Contents:

Moving Matter: Worlds f Material Culture

Part I Museology Representation and Colonial Liabilities

1. After Interpretive Dominance

2. "Wo Ist Afrika?": Of Reflexive Museography, and Other (Productive?) Disappointments

3. "Out of Context"- Translocation of West African Artefacts to European Museums: The Case of the Leo Frobenius Collection From Mali

4. The Museum as a Colonial Archive. The Collection of Victor and Marie Solioz and Its Role in Forgetting the Colonial Past

5. Museum Collections in Transit: Towards A History of The Artefacts Of The Endeavour Voyage

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Part II Heuristic Materiality Meanings and Transformations

6. "To Give Away My Collection For Free Would Be Nonsense": Decorations And The Emergence Of Ethnology In Imperial Germany

7. Discourse On Objectification And Personification: Modern Forms Of Material Cultural Identity In The Touareg Society

8. The Material Culture Of Vodun: Case Studies From Ghana, Togo, Germany And In-Between

9. Ndambirkus and Ndaokus; Asmat Skulls In Transit

10. On The Art Of Forging Gods: Techniques, Forces And Materials In An Afro-Brazilian Religion.