I’ve written before about the discovery of “ethnographic busts” in the museum’s collection, and about my plans to use them as an introduction to the Museum. The plan has been percolating, slowly, and it’s time for an update. One reason things at museums take a long time is that it’s good policy to share drafts and get feedback on ideas. That’s especially true at a university museum. And the feedback on this exhibit has been strong. Anthropologists – even those…
Anthropology museums are not easy places to explain. For those who know about the history of the anthropology, they carry a lot of baggage, a long history of exoticising the other, of scientific racism, of cultural and social evolution. For those just walking in off the street, it’s very easy for the displays to reinforce cultural notions based in part on that long history: don’t read the labels, and the displays of many anthropology exhibits still seem to be about…
This plaster cast is one of eight in the collection of the Haffenreffer Museum. They’re a bit of a mystery; there’s no paperwork on them. And they’re not the sort of thing the museum traditionally collected. They came from the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, in the 1980s. That’s about as much as we knew. As much as we knew from the object, anyway. As historians, anthropologists, and curators, we knew that these figures of “races of…
