A conversation on difference, Otherness and possibilities in museums
Abstract
How does the representation of visual/material cultures in museums enhance a sense of Otherness, rather than facilitating connection? How do museum spaces engage with difference? Does ‘difference’ necessarily have to be the frame of representation in museums? Such questions on the politics of display, ownership and representation are acutely important in the context of work that museums do with communities. How is the new museology of museums rooted within communities different from museums displaying communities? What can this new museology learn from previous engagements by museum actors with source communities and multiple stakeholders?
Using ‘Otherness’, ‘difference’ and ‘communities’ as analytical frames, this article is a conversation between a museologist (Poornima Sardana) who wishes to work more with communities and an anthropologist (Shivangi Pareek) who worked in museums while understanding communities. The intent is to bring together perspectives at the intersection of museum studies and ethnographic work and reflect on plural entanglements within museums. Through this dialogic text the authors touch upon relevant concerns in their respective fields and highlight some of their shared concerns about inclusion, collaboration and equity within museum spaces.
Citation: Sardana, Poornima and Shivangi Pareek. “A conversation on difference, Otherness and possibilities in museums” The Jugaad Project, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023, www.thejugaadproject.pub/museum-conversation [date of access]
Poornima: Shivangi, how do you perceive difference and otherness in the context of museums?
Shivangi: Thanks, Poornima, for getting us started with this very important question. Thinking about ‘difference’ can be so important and generative within museums. For instance, I’m thinking in what ways can we engage with differences within museums so that it facilitates reflection and creative possibilities and not othering? How do we work towards decolonising museums, especially museums that work with ‘communities’, to think beyond the available frames of differences as simplistic opposition between the dominant/subordinate, insider/outsider?
The questions of difference and otherness within museums are particularly important in post-colonial contexts where communities are asserting their rights to self-determination and control over their own histories.
I am going to think about your question through an exhibition that I came across a few years ago, which was helpful for me to think about the questions that can emerge in the process of collaboration and consultation with ‘source communities’ in museum practice. It is the exhibition on Racial Continuities titled Revealing Histories: Myths about Race (2007-2009), at the Manchester Museum¹. Before I began my fieldwork, this work helped me think about what difference and working with communities can mean and make possible within museums. I found that the questions that this exhibition and its responses raises resonated with my own encounters during my research.
I want to refer to Lynch and Alberti’s (2010) essay on the exhibition². They talk about how the exhibition sought to deal with the uncomfortable history and racist vestiges of Enlightenment thought that have carried on into the twentieth century. The participatory process behind this exhibition aimed to create and co-produce a multi-vocal exhibition focusing on the Museum's own racist histories. Lynch and Alberti (2010) argue that the exhibition at Manchester failed in its collaboration as it did not actively promote, and avoided, conflicting points of view. The Museum failed to move beyond the ‘comfort zone’ of ‘partnership’ rhetoric and superficial consultation practices. According to them, it failed to move into the ‘contact zone’³ (Clifford 1997: 188-219; quoted in Lynch and Alberti 2010) of collaboration and co-production even as that was originally intended.
They argue that the understanding of ‘contact zones’ must be not one of perfect collaboration and agreement but of differences and disagreement. It is important to assess whether collaboration opens a space that is open to difference, conflict and continuous transformation. One can argue that while intersecting viewpoints, conflicting interests and interpretations can seem to undermine the authority of museums as institutions and threaten their stability, it is these very conflicts and tensions that make museums more dynamic. Hence, to answer your question, it seems to me that discord, difference and dissonance, is not only important but necessary for museums to continue to thrive and stay relevant.
Shivangi: Poornima, you have worked in many such projects of collaborations and contexts where community members have been active participants and actors in the museum processes. I would love to hear more about your experiences of working in these settings. I’m sure reflections around difference and othering have come up repeatedly in your work. In addition to the above questions, can you reflect on how difference and otherness are reconfigured within museums and in the process of display and representation when working with communities?
Poornima: To be inclusive of the range of museums and museum-like spaces in India, we could perhaps consider not only community-owned museums (which are rare) but also museums where particular communities are represented or are the stakeholders - community based museums.
Reconfiguring difference and otherness appear to be a continuous negotiation that begins where there is an intent to do so. It is the lack of this intent to see the complexity in relations with communities and the ‘politics of display’, that leads to exhibitions that increase distances between diverse cultures, ways of living and perspectives. However, we cannot critique such institutions in isolation as museums are products of their ‘social context’ (Macdonald, 1992). And it is only in inclusive contexts of the plural forms of community museums that the display and representation can be nuanced.
In 2018, as part of the museum coordination team at the Rajasthan Rural Arts Programme (RRAP) Hub Museum in Jaipur, Rajasthan, we learnt that a reduction in this distance between communities (those building a museum and those being represented by the museum) begins with listening. Listening without preconceived solutions or offerings. Listening with the acknowledgement that we do not know what a community needs and desires. The formats in which such listening takes place are varied, from interviews and group discussions to conferences. The intent is to understand and make place for diverse perspectives, however, not without the acknowledgement that the ones facilitating such discussions often enjoy the position of patrons. At RRAP, we were working closely with folk music performers from Rajasthan and their communities. Since we could not do away with the societal hierarchies we were functioning within, our process involved having stakeholders from within folk performers as our advisors guiding the purpose of the upcoming museum. These advisors however had a long relationship with the founders of the museum and are considered authority figures in their respective artforms. The discussions were being facilitated by an anthropologist who has been deeply engaged with the communities and their earlier interactions with the founders. The advisors were eventually the museum educators in our programme offerings who had the space to design curricula and teach in workshops as they deemed fit. This project was different from their usual engagement with cultural institutions because they weren’t presented as their own ‘frozen’ identities from the past (Harrison, 2013). Their participation wasn’t tokenism but actively shaped the nature of the Museum’s offerings and public relations.
I would like to acknowledge though that I am being simplistic in referring to frozen identities of the past as something that is only conferred upon folk practitioners. In their quest to be recognised and valued as ‘official heritage’ (Harrison, 2013), practitioners end up adopting visual identities that seem authentic or traditional, thereby continuing with symbols that are particular and hence, marked as different. For instance, in the now-demolished Kathputli Colony of Delhi, Rajasthani puppeteers would immediately get dressed in traditional attire when an outsider would visit. Or during their protest against forceful rehabilitation, they reclaimed their identity as folk performers during demonstrations with life-size puppets, acrobats and musicians. This reclamation was fierce, as they wanted to be acknowledged as ‘living heritage’. To display one’s heritage for these practitioners can be as much a matter of professional identity and survival as it is of socio-cultural standing. It is a response to society and market. A need for belonging to something larger than the individual. There seems to be some possibility of choice, agency.
But it changes when that is the only option inside a cultural institution, when standing out is the only way to be seen and acknowledged. While awe or spectacle in a museum display could be the initiation into knowing more, rarely do the exhibits and narratives in museums lead to long term deeper engagement with communities, thus reducing them to being the exotic ‘other’. Difference is perhaps crucial for continuity; it is the ‘otherness’ that is to be countered through museums.
Poornima: Shivangi, what is your experience of listening in fieldwork? How do you move beyond awe when engaging with communities and their ways of living? Is there something that could be reinterpreted for museum engagement?
Shivangi: I find your reflections so thought provoking, especially what you just said about the limitations of spectacle and visibility where it can be othering and does not often lead to deeper engagements. Indeed, my fieldwork experiences have also reinforced for me that there is a complicated relationship between visibility and otherness. In my work with Adivasi artists, I often noticed that they made certain creative choices in their work based on their gradual understanding of what gets more visibility in the markets. However, as you’re reminding us, these attempts to seek visibility need to be understood not only as a creative and economic decision but also reflective of the claims or attempts to seek a political visibility. I’m so inspired by your reflections on the need to think about the limits of a politics premised on visibility. What happens when standing out is the only way to be seen and acknowledged? You’re right that awe or spectacle in a museum display could be the initiation into knowing more but they rarely lead to long term deeper engagement with communities, thus contributing to their ‘othering’ and it is this otherness that has to be worked with creatively. There is indeed a greater responsibility on museum practitioners to contextualise visibility and not let it reduce encounters in museums to fleeting interests but a more enduring engagement.
To answer the second part of your question, I think it is the long-term fieldwork and the writing process that helped develop critical reflections over time as I tried to comprehend and make sense of my varied conversations and experiences on the field. When I was doing fieldwork in Central India for my dissertation, over time, I realised that I was not only developing an intimate understanding of the lives of my interlocutors but also developing a reflexive distance from them. I have been able to experience and nurture such reflections even more after I physically moved away from my field and started writing. In anthropological work, I think it is the distance that writing demands that often helps one move away from ‘awe’ or other more immediate responses to our interlocutors and their lives.
With some of the reflections that have emerged for me in my work, I want to offer that we think about the idea of ‘communities’⁴ and how we can unpack it to get a deeper understanding of how we think about communities, collaboration, difference and ‘Othering’ within museums. I have found it helpful to engage with the idea of museums as contested zones which opens the space for power negotiations and participation between different groups. It allows me to approach museums not as spaces of curatorial authority but plural interests, negotiations, frictions, contestations and conflicts that emerge from the ‘contacts’ or encounters that take place. As a plural and dynamic space, it also becomes important to contest, critique and question the idea of a singular ‘community’ in museums or a coherent point of view that represents the community’s interests. Moreover, neither are voices from ‘source communities’ homogenous, nor is collaboration a homogenising process.
I want to go back to the points raised by Lynch and Alberti in reference to the exhibition at the Manchester Museum. They argue that the exhibition brought the Museums face-to-face with the challenges of participation, co-production, everyday politics, conflict and community activism. Even as the exhibition not only critically engaged with an uncomfortable truth of racism but also the Museum’s own complicity with those injustices (Scott 2007; Teslow 2007, quoted in Lynch and Alberti 2010). Attempting to talk about the history of the slave trade and its contemporary ramifications was an issue and experience that held deep and strong resonance for communities with which the Museum sought to collaborate and hence, participation in this exhibition caused frustration for many actors.
Lynch and Alberti argue that museums could and should be spaces of contestations as much as collaboration, which allows for divergent interests and agendas to flourish with the museum’s potential of being a ‘focalising agent, capable of drawing together diverse and antagonistic constituencies’ (Hebdige 1993: 272, quoted in Lynch and Alberti 2010). They conclude their analysis by asking if by relying on the supposed neutrality of academia and professionalism, the Museum was distancing itself from the lived experience and harsh realities of racism in everyday life. Moreover, they argue that participation does not eliminate the power difference that the institution is entrenched in. The ‘shared spaces’ continue to remain exclusive, political, and may even further prejudices. The biggest issue, the authors argue, is the assumption that there can be a uniform voice that emerges out of collaboration.
The search for a consensus often becomes exclusionary and becomes a desire to eliminate differences. Hence, what museums need is the ability to accept that collaboration within the museums can be dynamic and surprising. Lynch and Alberti suggest the adoption of what they call ‘radical trust’ wherein the museum cannot control the outcome. Hence, instead of set outcomes, the museums need to focus on the process, the methodology of a project, the relations and interactions. It cannot be assumed under any circumstances that collaboration in a museum space can be cordial; it is a process that is full of conflict, difficulties and destabilising self-reflection for the museum as an institution, its purpose and its function. I think that if this complexity and the generative potential of difference is acknowledged, accepted, and a utopian collaboration and harmony is not imagined, museums as institutions have much to benefit from the process of collaboration.
Shivangi: Do you have any examples to share that can speak of creative reimaginings of difference within museum spaces in new and interesting ways? What does their process of selection and curation look like?
Poornima: I can share examples of creative reimaginings of what a museum can be and how it functions, reimagining a museum’s purpose, collection and forms of public engagement beyond being an ‘information institution’ (Macdonald, 1992). Often it requires a radical rethinking of who the museum’s stakeholders are, who constitutes the public, where ‘the relationship between the museum and the public must be understood as a revolution in process’ (Weil, 1997).
A model to learn from could be the story museum set up by Kahani Ki Dukaan Foundation in Gunehar village near Bir, Himachal Pradesh. The Museum is a community space and library for art display, storytelling and performance art workshops that was set up in collaboration with the local villagers, with an intent to bring stories to children. Created using found objects in a rented mud house, over a period it has grown into a space not just for children but local women as well to express themselves, to address their concerns and feel empowered through sharing and learning of new skills. Unlike usual museums, the Kahani Ki Dukaan does not have a material collection; instead, it has brought together an interactive display of stories of the locals through participatory workshops. They bring to the village stories from outside, thereby leading to an exchange of stories, and through them, perspectives that might otherwise not meet. While tourists and artists from around the world visit Kahani Ki Dukaan to engage with the local public and their stories, and to express their own, stories from Gunehar also travel to art festivals and events in different cities. Through their creative reimagination of a museum, Kahani Ki Dukaan acknowledges differences and makes place for the participants to empathise with those whose stories they experience. Difference is not exhibited as a spectacle on display, it is presented as part of complex lived realities.
The process followed by Kahani Ki Dukaan seems to be co-creation and continuous improvisation. Facilitated by the co-founders, Kahani Ki Dukaan appears to be an organic process that grows in response to the needs and aspirations of its local public. They might have started with bringing stories and creative thinking to children in the village, but over time they have become a significant space for expressions of what they term ‘rural feminism’, vocational skills and boosting local tourism⁵. Even though it is not monetarily funded by the locals, its existence is more responsive than philanthropic. It leaves scope for their stakeholders to exercise ownership and have an evolving relationship with the Museum and the stories it tells. Such curatorial practice demands an acceptance of uncertainty and letting go of control over outcomes. The inclusion of narratives would depend on the facilitators as well as the participants.
Figure 1. Making museums and communities: What would inclusion and collaboration with communities in museums look like? Photo by Shivangi Pareek, Tribal Museum, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, 2022.
Poornima: Shivangi, what are your thoughts on navigation of internal conflicts within communities? How is ownership over representation navigated in ethnographic field work and its outcomes? Are there examples that could perhaps define a code of ethics for museums working with communities?
Shivangi: This is an excellent question, Poornima. In my dissertation I’m writing about the growing production and circulation of Adivasi⁶ ‘art’ in India and examine how the everyday work of making art brings together diverse actors, histories and aspirations and both resists and reproduces power relations and inequality. During my research I became aware that in the Adivasi context, networks of opportunities and mobilities are shaped by class, caste, and gender inequalities. Attentive to these internal hierarchies and not assuming homogenous moral economies, I focused on the ambivalence that surrounds the political potential of Adivasi cultural production in India. This perspective helped me to stay critical of conceptualizing collaboration between indigenous and state actors as an equalising and empowering experience and led me to focus on disjuncture, hierarchies and inequalities that continue to emerge.
I gradually understood how to identify and work with these power asymmetries. For instance, after a few months of fieldwork, I could see that I needed to spend time outside of institutional spaces, including the Tribal Museum to meet with community members who did not have access to these spaces, or did not feel the need, or felt uncomfortable in accessing these spaces. Many of them were already working as dependents and collaborators with other more powerful and more vocal community members. Once again, it is the long-term immersion that ethnographic work demands that allowed me to understand these power dynamics and hierarchies in communities. I would also like to highlight that these hierarchies and asymmetries may never emerge as ‘conflicts’ and often remain deeply embedded as forms of support and dependence in families and homes.
To respond to your question about both the ownership of representations and outcomes of research, I can think of one reference that I have found to be immensely helpful in thinking about the problems and possibilities of working with communities. It is a ‘discussion paper’ titled ‘Community in Conservation: Beyond Enchantment and Disenchantment’⁷ by Arun Aggarwal as a part of The Conservation and Discussion Forum. Although the paper engages with the ethics and guidelines of working with communities in the context of conservation practice, the insights in the paper can be very generative for museums. I’ll just mention here a few ideas that I thought were particularly relevant and can be instructive for thinking about community collaborations in museums.
The authors note that in thinking about ‘community in conservation’ it seems that there are ideas about communities as fixed and pristine groups untouched by external forces that seem to dominate our imaginations. However, rather than completely dismissing these ideas as idyllic, it is also important to recognise that such valorisations of communities can be read as attempts to critique the available modes and categories. It seems that the idea of working with communities can indeed offer a corrective or alternative to the dominant categories of representation and display in museums. Hence, such a shift towards ‘community’ is a move in the right direction where a critical engagement with museum practice and the politics of representation is concerned.
How do we then think about ‘communities’ as a critical and integral concept in museum practice that recognises the difference and intersecting layers of ‘Othering’ that exist within communities and museums? Building on the discussion that Arun Aggarwal offers in the CDF paper, one generative perspective can be to think of museum communities not as fixed, either by ideas about origins or reception of museum work but to think of communities as ‘emergent’. They are then shifting groups that emerge dynamically with their own internal differences and hierarchies in the process of engagement and collaboration.
In so moving away from fixing and othering notions of what a community means, it allows us to focus on pluralities that exist and emerge in the museums in the process of engagement. In thinking about communities as emergent, we can also be more open to thinking about political investments as not fixed but emergent and uncertain. When individuals or groups engage with practices of representation, it is perhaps often the case that such collaborations are not driven by fixed political investments. What one can perhaps highlight and enhance in such collaborations is the acceptance that there are power hierarchies within the museums and within the communities that museum practitioners are engaging with. With this recognition, one can strive for more autonomy, space and voice for those who are disadvantaged in shifting power asymmetries. Such attempts to pronounce or enhance would also need to check and change repeatedly.
Poornima, I’m also reminded here of your reference to the importance of ‘listening’ in your discussion of your work in 2018, as part of the museum coordination team at the Rajasthan Rural Arts Programme (RRAP) Hub Museum. You mention how you learnt that a reduction in this distance between communities (those building a museum and those being represented by the museum) begins with listening. Listening without preconceived solutions or offerings. Listening with the acknowledgement that we do not know what a community needs and desires. I understand your emphasis on ‘listening’ as an attentiveness to uncertainty, as thinking about communities as not fixed but changing and emphasizing the need to remain spontaneous and receptive to checks and to change repeatedly.
Another important question however is how museums can respond to demands of collaboration and community engagement with restricted and increasingly shrinking funding, audience engagement, educational function and other more contextual political and economic obligations. The answers to these questions cannot be entirely idealistic and have to take into account a more holistic view of museums as ‘historically situated social institutions’ (Ames 1992: 4) with their own particularities and networks that they are entangled with structural constraints, governing bodies, official mandates, corporate support, public responsibilities, economic limitations etc. Hence, the assessment of processes in museums cannot be entirely an analysis of impact or effect but an assessment of its entanglements.
Shivangi: Poornima, I can only imagine the multiple challenges that emerge in executing time- and funding-bound projects in museums. With an approach that works with uncertainty and potentialities, one must face even more challenges when working with already dynamic projects of community collaborations. I would love to hear if you have any experiences to share from your work with communities that focused more on the decision-making process rather than the outcomes. As I note in my previous response, we can sometimes also romanticise communities as idyllic, whole, egalitarian groups. How does one deal with internal hierarchies that continue historically or emerge during the processes of creation, curation, exhibition and representation in museums?
Poornima: We’ll find a range of responses across museums and museum-like spaces when it comes to internal hierarchies and conflicts within communities. In an interview, the co-founders of Kahani Ki Dukaan mentioned that to counter caste barriers in the village and hence, the Museum’s public, they would not allow the use of last names inside the Museum (Chaturvedi, 2022). This is an active stand taken by the Museum as part of the community it serves in response to its prevalent issues. Perhaps it was possible because the facilitators are not from the village and enjoy the distance and authority.
In traditional community-based, eco-museums and universal survey museums, the entire complexity of communities is reduced to a singular unit with identifiable characteristics and beliefs. Traditionally such museums reflected the distances that exist in society, of grand narratives, which they would represent in a simplified manner. It is in alternative community-centric initiatives that internal hierarchies are not only visible but also often addressed. There is space for critique and even activism. At RRAP, musicians from different castes also performed together and sat on a higher or equal pedestal as their upper caste public. These are subtle but important markers of a shift that such museums can create. But not every initiative can lead to long-term impact.
I am also reminded of Surajit Sarkar’s experiment (2013) with the Catapult Arts Caravan performances in Northeast and Central Asia:
“Intermixing digital audiovisual techniques with performative folk-art practice, community participation, and debate, the Caravan process provokes community discussion on issues of common concern. In addition to providing an occasion for self-reflection, the performance event creates a Rabelaisian moment by allowing a mix of many local voices to express their particular views on a shared moment.”
Further Sarkar (2013: 159) draws from the Bakhtinian analogy, saying that:
“it is possible to explore what happens during a Caravan performance as an extension of the idea of “carnival.” … Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; rather, they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all of the people.”
It is this living of the experience that can perhaps allow honest dialogue. Most mainstream museums cannot make place for the same, for it demands a shift from permanence and control to spontaneity. Even within the variety of community-based museums I wonder how it would be possible in community-owned museums where existing power dynamics are bound to seep into the museum.
I did find some answers in my experiences with the Kathputli Colony in Delhi. As founder of the Friends of Kathputli Colony initiative, in 2013, I was working with more than twelve communities and sub-communities of folk and street performers residing at the Colony and fighting for a fair rehabilitation process. During that period of engagement, I learnt from puppeteer Puran Bhatt the basics of community participation and navigating conflict. Meeting stakeholders, group discussions, larger public gatherings, information dissemination and encouraging the youth to take ownership, these were some of the strategies involved whether organizing protests or an event or exhibition. I would often wonder why none of the elders in the Colony would lead the others, and why they always mentioned that they need someone from outside, perhaps they had realised that someone from within the community could not navigate their internal conflicts or bring them together. I am thus keen to follow magician Ishamudin Khan, founder of The Indian Street Performers Association Trust and resident of the Colony who is currently raising funds to create a museum of street magicians of India. It would be helpful to learn from him as he addresses the internal conflicts of his communities in the process of imagining their museum.
Shivangi: Thank you so much for all these exciting references, Poornima. As my last question, would you like to share any examples of community collaborations that you have found generative? Have you come across any alternative frames of reference when curating with community members in museums?
Poornima: Some alternative frames where we could locate community-based museums are: museums as agents of change, social justice, value, social impact and community well-being. The Sustainable Development Goals are a guiding factor for museums around the world. In these alternative frameworks the museum is imagined not as a site of education alone but with a purpose to contribute to a better future.
I would like to share the example of Tandel Fund of Archives, a “socially engaged ethnographic archive” and pop-up museum of the Son Koli Tribes (Fisher-folk) in Mumbai (Tandel Fund of Archives, 2019). Kadambari Anjali Mahesh Tandel and Parag Kamal Kashinath Tandel are the founders of the Archive that works closely with their own communities to collect, document and share knowledge about the Kolis, their relationship with the ocean, and their significance in the history of Mumbai. Their work spans across climate change, knowledge of food, language and music, and professional tools among varied aspects of their lives and ecosystem. The Archive itself began as a response to Parag and Kadambari’s query, why are the Kolis not represented in any mainstream museum of Mumbai? Not finding their place in historical narratives led them to the creation of an online archive and pop-up museums that create a place for the tribes to connect with Mumbai’s public, to be understood as a part of the city, their contribution valued. Their ‘socially engaged’ archive has produced books documenting language/poetry and art installations that question the metropolis’ impact on the ocean and its ecosystem. It focuses on collective knowledge creation while ensuring that the archive is free of any external dependency and pressures. However, I wonder if such decolonising of the museum space can truly break away from the official structures of authorisation and approval of heritage? Why do we still call these spaces “museums”?
References
Lynch, B. and S. J. M. M. Alberti (2010). ‘Legacies of prejudice: Racism, co-production and radical trust in the museum’. Museum, Management and Curatorship, 25(1), pp. 13-35.
Ames, M. M., (1992.) Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums. II ed. UBC Canada: UBC Press Vancouver.
Cornwall, A. and J. Gaventa, 2001. From Users and Choosers to Makers and Shapers. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies working paper.
Boas, F., 1887. Museums of Ethnology and their Classification. Science, Volume 9, pp. 587-9.
Clifford, J., (1997). Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
Harrison, R. (2013). Heritage: Critical Approaches. New York: Routledge.
Herle, A., 2003. Objects, Agency and Museums: Continuing dialogues between Torres Strait and Cambridge. in: Peers, L. and A. K. Brown (eds.), (2003), Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 194-207.
Macdonald, G. (1992). Change and Challenge: Museums in the Information Society. Museums And Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. 158-181.
Peers, L. L. and A. K. Brown (eds.), (2003), Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, London and New York: Routledge.
Sarkar, S. (2013). Arts, Activism, Ethnography: Catapult Arts Caravan, 2004-2010. Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2). https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/mar/article/view/2174/4256
Scott, M., (2007). Rethinking Evolution in the Museum: Envisioning African Origins. London: Routledge.
Tandel Fund of Archives (2019). Tandel Fund of Archives.
Teslow, T. L., (2007). A Troubled Legacy: Making and Unmaking Race in the Museum. Museums and Social Issues 2, Volume 2, pp. 11-44.
Wallach, C. D. a. A., (1978). Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis. Marxist Perspectives, Volume Winter, pp. 28-51.
Further Resources
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09647779708565852?journalCode=rmmc20
https://www.instagram.com/kahanikidukaan/
https://www.cntraveller.in/story/gunehar-himachal-pradesh-village-kahani-ki-dukaan/
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/mar/article/view/2174/4256
Endnotes
1. The exhibition was titled Revealing Histories: Myths about Race (2007-2009). The work in reference here, which is an analysis of this exhibition is: Lynch and Alberti (2010).
2. Lynch, B. and S. J. M. M. Alberti (2010). ‘Legacies of prejudice: Racism, co-production and radical trust in the museum’. Museum, Management and Curatorship, 25(1), pp. 13-35.
3. James Clifford refers to museums as a ‘contact zone’ (1997: 192) where multiple communities come into contact and a complex contestation of power negotiations takes place. While power negotiations and frictions emerge, the space also marks a diffusion of power. Curatorial authority in this contact zone is re-shaped, challenged and diffused. Philipp Schorch in his paper ‘Contact Zone, Third Spaces and the Act of Interpretation’ (2012) notes that Clifford (1997) borrowed Mary Louisse Pratt’s (1991) notion of ‘contact zones’ to argue for museum spaces as places of ‘contentious and collaborative relations and interrelations’ (Schorch 2012: 1-2)
4. See Peers, Laura and Brown, Alison K (ed.), (2003), Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, Routledge London and New York. Source communities in the museum context have been defined as ‘communities from which museum collections originate’ (Peers and Brown 2003: 1).
5. See Instagram handle @kahanikidukaan
6. The term ‘Adivasi’ can be translated as ‘original inhabitants’ and is a form of political identification asserted by groups historically marginalised by the colonial and post-colonial forms of governance and nation building in South Asia. Simultaneously ‘original inhabitants’ and modern primitives, Adivasis continue to find and assert a place within the diversity of Indian subcontinent, projects of nationalism, and efforts to craft a distinctively South-Asian modernity.
7. The Conservation & Development Forum (CDF) is an independent partnership among the University of Florida, the Ford Foundation, and a global network of scholars and practitioners.
