Search results for ""Author Alison K. Brown""

When the Franklin Motor Expedition set out across the Canadian Prairies to collect First Nations artifacts, brutal assimilation policies threatened to decimate these cultures and extensive programs of ethnographic salvage were in place. Despite having only three members, the expedition amassed the largest single collection of Prairie heritage items currently held in a British museum.In this book, Alison K. Brown draws together the multiple narratives that make up this encounter, consulting descendants of the collectors and members of the affected First Nations and reviewing both expedition images and the artifacts themselves. In doing so, she explores the context within which the collection was made as well as the complex relationships between museums, anthropologists, and First Nations.Accessibly written and vigorously researched, First Nations, Museums, Narrations raises timely questions about the role of collections in the twenty-first century and considers the way forward for indigenous peoples and the museums that house their cultural treasures.

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In the pages of this beautifully illustrated volume is the story of aneffort to build a bridge between museums and source communities inhopes of establishing stronger, more sustaining relationships betweenthe two and spurring change in prevailing museum policies. Theexperience of negotiating the tension between a museum’sinstitutional protocol described by both the authors and by Blackfootcontributors to the volume was transformative. Museums seek to preserveobjects for posterity. However, the emotional and spiritual power ofobjects does not vanish with the death of those who created them. ForBlackfoot people today, these shirts are a living presence, one thatevokes a sense of continuity and inspires pride in Blackfoot culturalheritage.

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Model of a Summer Camp is an intriguing object with a range of stories to tell. Originating in the Sakha (Yakutia) region of far northeastern Russia, it depicts a yhyakh celebration – a festival of huge cultural importance to the region. This concise book takes a detailed look at the object, revealing the intricacies of the yhyakh and the model’s fascinating journey from Siberia to the British Museum. The recent resurgence of interest around the model is also explored, where creative responses and research have enriched our understanding of its stories. This book gives readers the opportunity to learn about a unique object in the British Museum’s Collection and the rich heritage of Sakha (Yakutia).

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Recreating First Contact explores themes related to the proliferation of adventure travel which emerged during the early twentieth century and that were legitimized by their associations with popular views of anthropology. During this period, new transport and recording technologies, particularly the airplane and automobile and small, portable, still and motion-picture cameras, were utilized by a variety of expeditions to document the last untouched places of the globe and bring them home to eager audiences. These expeditions were frequently presented as first contact encounters and enchanted popular imagination. The various narratives encoded in the articles, books, films, exhibitions and lecture tours that these expeditions generated fed into pre-existing stereotypes about racial and technological difference, and helped to create them anew in popular culture. Through an unpacking of expeditions and their popular wakes, the essays (12 chapters, a preface, introduction and afterward) trace the complex but obscured relationships between anthropology, adventure travel and the cinematic imagination that the 1920s and 1930s engendered and how their myths have endured. The book further explores the effects - both positive and negative - of such expeditions on the discipline of anthropology itself. However, in doing so, this volume examines these impacts from a variety of national perspectives and thus through these different vantage points creates a more nuanced perspective on how expeditions were at once a global phenomenon but also culturally ordered.

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