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* Explains why batik is such a powerful reminder of times past* Showcases a new approach to collection history research In Collectors Collected, a picture of Dutch colonial culture is drawn with the help of batik. While the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam was re-evaluating the history of its collections and objects, Daan van Darrel performed a pilot study on a selection from the museum s batik collection which resulted in a new approach to collection history research.Studying the social biographies of batik textiles and more specifically the collectors and then categorizing the results revealed the usefulness of gathering the different contexts that objects live in before they become musealized. Not only did the museum learn more about the actual people behind the objects and about the different meanings attributed to the objects during their lifetimes, but it also became aware of the very important role batik once played in the colonial socio-cultural environment and continues to play among descendants of the participants in that society."
This is the fifth volume of a series of ten books that discuss the collections of the Tropenmuseum and the histories and stories that accompany them. The books elucidate the often hidden backgrounds of a museum collection, discussing objects within their original context, social histories and their contemporary meaning. The main emphasis lies on the history of each collection, with its different collecting and presentation practices placed in a particular time and place. Each volume is richly illustrated with objects and photographs from the Tropenmuseum collection.
Oceania at the Tropenmuseum is not in the first place a book on art from Oceania, but rather a treatise on the coming into existence and growth of a well-known Oceanic collection, which started at the beginning of the 20th century with the bringing together of the collections of the Colonial Museum in the Dutch provincial town of Haarlem and the ethnographic collection of Artis, the Amsterdam Zoo. The objects were, then and later on, brought together by early explorers, travellers, scientific expeditions, missionaries, Dutch government officials, ethnologists and collectors, most of them within the context of Dutch colonial presence in New Guinea, from where the majority of objects originate. During the last hundred years the intellectual approach to the collection changed from evidences of cultures in far-away places to the cultural heritage of world citizens, whose objects of art and material culture has been amassed during the colonial period of Western history. This richly illustrated book emphasizes this historical context and the way the objects were collected and presented to the public until today.
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MUSEUM TRANSFORMATIONS DECOLONIZATION AND DEMOCRATIZATION Edited By ANNIE E. COOMBES AND RUTH B. PHILLIPS Museum Transformations: Decolonization and Democratization addresses contemporary approaches to decolonization, greater democratization, and revisionist narratives in museum exhibition and program development around the world. The text explores how museums of art, history, and ethnography responded to deconstructive critiques from activists and poststructuralist and postcolonial theorists, and provided models for change to other types of museums and heritage sites. The volume's first set of essays discuss the role of the museum in the narration of difficult histories, and how altering the social attitudes and political structures that enable oppression requires the recognition of past histories of political and racial oppression and colonization in museums. Subsequent essays consider the museum's new roles in social action and discuss experimental projects that work to change power dynamics within institutions and leverage digital technology and new media.
Traditionally, the term boundary applies to the demarcation between a physical place and another physical place, most commonly associated with lines on a map As the essays in this volume demonstrate, however, a boundary can also function in a more broadly conceptual manner. A boundary becomes not an “imaginary line” but a tool for thinking about how to separate any two elements, whether ideas, events, etc., into categories by which they become comprehensible and distinct. The scholar contributors seek not simply to discern the boundaries, but, and perhaps more importantly, to understand the process of delination, and its consequences. With its maverick history and grass-root political traditions, the Netherlands provides an auspicious setting to examine the historical function of boundaries both real and imagined.
In this volume the exhibition "Eastward Bound! Art, Culture and Colonialism" forms the background against which a variety of experts discuss the issue of the museums collection which, along with the history of the formation of the collection, forms a unique source of knowledge about the way in which the Dutch have handled issues surrounding colonialism and decolonization in the past centuries. A variety of objects, representative for the four phases in the colonial relations, from 1600, through the period of colonial expansion with Dutch administration, ethical politics and finally decolonization, are depicted.
This open access book discusses political, economic, social, and humanitarian challenges that influence both how people deal with their past and how they build their identities in contemporary Europe. Ongoing debates on migration, on local, national, inter- and transnational levels, prove that it is a divisive issue with regards to understanding European integration and identity. At the same time, the European Union increasingly invests in projects related to European heritage, museums, and cultural memory networks, while having to take dissonant heritages into account. These processes in their combination offer an interesting dynamic and form the complex puzzle that poses challenging questi...