back to the future?: Emergent Visions for Object-Based Teaching in and beyond the Classroom

This article introduces a special issue of Museum Anthropology devoted to innovative strategies for teaching with objects. Although a century ago anthropology, museums, and objects were intimately entwined, trends in many museology and anthropology courses have drifted toward focusing on ideas and people rather than objects. The contributors to this special issue have cultivated new pedagogical approaches that complement or realign literaturefocused classroom canons that can distance students from the very objects under study. In keeping with recent theoretical approaches to objects that highlight the sensory dimensions of material culture, many of the articles in this special issue examine the challenges and potential rewards when educators foster physical engagement with objects in and beyond the classroom. Taken together, the articles also underscore how object-based teaching can yield new theoretical and practical insights, enhance the social relevance of classroom activities, and facilitate meaningful benefits for local communities. [material culture, praxis, pedagogy, embodied practices, object-based teaching] New Pedagogical Strategies for Experiencing and Learning from Objects This special issue on “Emergent Visions for ObjectBased Teaching in and beyond the Classroom” had its beginnings in a 2013 American Anthropological Association Invited Roundtable Session sponsored by the Council for Museum Anthropology and the Society for Visual Anthropology. Held in Chicago, this gathering brought together museum anthropologists from higher education institutions and museums to share insights into successful object-based teaching strategies in settings ranging from undergraduate anthropology classrooms, arts schools, and museum studies graduate seminars to public museums. All but two of the presenters from the roundtable session have contributed articles to this special issue, which also includes an additional, complementary article solicited from a scholar not present at the roundtable (Mark Turin). Chicago’s distinguished museum anthropology history made it a particularly apt venue for an initial round of explorations on this topic. Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition launched Franz Boas’s career and generated the core of the Field Museum’s extensive anthropology collections (Stocking 1988). It would even be reasonable to suggest that it was at this 1893 Chicago exposition that museum anthropology gained a broader public following. By the turn of the last century, anthropological objects were conceived of as central epistemological material for our discipline, and museums were integral parts of academic departments (Morphy and Perkins 2006:5). Many large and smaller educational institutions, such as Harvard University, the University of California–Berkeley, the University of Washington–Seattle, and Beloit College, had anthropology or natural history museums whose collections were essential to both research and teaching. As all museum anthropologists know, some of the earliest 19th-century attempts at anthropological theory–building hinged on the analysis of museum artifacts in order to devise grand theories of unilineal cultural evolution. Likewise, museum displays such as those in the Pitt Rivers Museum arranged artifacts typologically, from the technologically simple to the technologically complex, thereby offering visitors visual tutelage in now-defunct Eurocentric theories concerning the progression of human cultural evolution (Chapman 1988). However, by the early 20th century, as these early theories came under fire as not only empirically and methodologically unsound but racist, British anthropologists began to shift their research methodologies away from museums and toward long-term ethnographic fieldwork and synchronic theoretical models of society (Morphy and Perkins 2006:6). Theories such as Alfred RadcliffeBrown’s (1952) structural functionalism emphasized social organization and carried anthropological research and teaching away from the tainted zones of unilineal cultural evolution, museums, and material culture. Across the Atlantic in the United States, opponents of unilineal evolutionary theories such as Boas initially envisioned museum collections as potential avenues for understanding historical intergroup relations (Morphy and Perkins 2006:5). museum anthropology Museum Anthropology, Vol. 38, Iss. 2, pp. 88–95 © 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/muan.12085 However, by 1905, Boas became convinced that a satisfactory representation of culture via material objects was impossible and resigned from his post at the American Museum of Natural History (Cruikshank 1992:5). As Donald Collier and Harry Tschopik observed in their 1954 discussion of the role of museums in American anthropology, Boas’s departure from the museum world also entailed a transplant of the new science of anthropology from the museum realm to that of the university. This move, then, signaled the beginnings of a rift between the museum-based study of material culture and the university-based anthropological study of ideology and human behavior (Collier and Tschopik 1954). This 20th-century fissure between the objectcentered world of museum anthropology and the idea-centered world of university-based sociocultural anthropology persisted into the 1980s, abetted by successive waves of fashionable theories from psychological anthropology to Saussurian semiotics in which objects and materiality were eclipsed. As Bruce Trigger recounts (Cruikshank 1992:5), museums’ marginalization from anthropology was further exacerbated when museums came to be associated with histories of colonial relations from which some anthropologists wished to detach themselves. Although there were certainly exceptions to these broader trends, it was not until the late 1970s and 1980s that academic anthropology began to rediscover the value of museum collections. This era saw a shift in perception of material culture: no longer were objects seen as simply passive mirrors of social relations; rather, objects came to be recognized as potentially active forces in intergroup relations (Graburn 1976), and museum artifacts were productively re-envisioned as having “social lives” (Appadurai 1988; Stocking 1988). These shifts paved the way for more recent interventions that spotlight materiality and the sensory aspects of objects, including their haptic, aromatic dimensions as well as the emotional engagement objects prompt in those around them (Dudley 2010; Edwards et al. 2006; Miller 2008). Ironically, with classrooms increasingly relying on two-dimensional PowerPoint images and recent publications questioning the relationship between museums and objects (Conn 2010), the ground for object-centered teaching seems to have eroded at the very moment that museum collections are being rediscovered by academic anthropologists. Yet, even as some have questioned the relevance of objects in museum settings, the recent “material turn” in anthropology has shown that classrooms and exhibition spaces must engage more rigorously and inventively with the fact that humans interact via material things. Although some may contend that institutions and social behaviors can be examined in the abstract, the contributors to this special issue all share the belief that the teaching of anthropology is enhanced when it embraces sensorial engagement with materiality. This special issue brings together scholars who have developed creative and innovative ways to integrate material worlds into and sometimes beyond their classrooms. Whether it is by manufacturing 3D scans of museum objects to revisit questions about replicas and models, requiring students to buy/sell objects in online auctions to spotlight the role of words and images in capitalist value creation, creating virtual displays of archival materials, curating socially relevant exhibits with anthropology students, or having classes engage in urban museum collections projects, all of the contributors offer insights into the role of materiality and object-centered teaching for a future generation of students. Back to the Future: Finding Paths to Bridge the Theoretical and the Material Worlds in Anthropology and Museology Classrooms Many of us teaching the anthropology of art or museology in university settings share a set of formative graduate school experiences that subsequently become templates for our own initial approaches to organizing our classes and seminars. For some of us who have come of age as museum-oriented anthropologists in the past two to three decades, our graduate school training frequently consisted of bifurcated classroom training experiences. My own experience as a graduate student in the 1980s entailed taking heavily object-centered museology graduate classes in the campus museum and theoretically oriented anthropology of (ethnic) art classes in the anthropology building. Never once did an artifact cross the threshold of my theory-oriented anthropology of art classes, and only occasionally did we view images of material culture in the classroom (generally slide back to the future?: emergent visions for object-based teaching