21-1 Museums and Indigenous Cultures

Tibetan School Project: Project Site; Katsel, Tibet

A wonderful dream has come true in a small Tibetan village northeast of Tibet's capital city Lhasa. For the first time in over 30 years, a school has been established in the village of Katsel, Medrogonkhar. It began in 1987 when Sonam Jamyangling visited his hometown, Katsel, after 28 years in exile and decided a school was desperately needed in the village. In the next year, Sonam, who lives in...

Representing Native Identity: The Trail of Tears and the Cherokee Heritage Center in Oklahoma

While studying the exhibitions in the Hall of the North American Indian in Harvard's Peabody Museum, I overheard a conversation between two other museum visitors whom I speculatively identified as a Harvard student and her European guest. The conversation was intriguing and revealing, particularly the following exchange. European guest: "How many Indians have survived?" Harvard student: "I think…...

Pygmies of Southwestern Uganda: Reaching the End of the Road - and the Beginning

Pygmies of Southwestern Uganda: Reaching the End of the Road-and the. Beginning Ethnically, Abayanda represent the most eastern range of Pygmoid Africans on the eastern edge of the great tropical rain forests of Africa. Pygmies, by various, and may number up to 300,000 persons. The majority live in close association with remaining forests. Abayanda, like other Pygmies, are a hunter-gatherer...

Negotiating Identity: Rhetoric, Metaphor and Social Drama in Northern Ireland.

Washington: Smithsonian Institution 1995. x+270 pp. notes, bibliography, index $44.50 (cloth) ISBN 1-56098-520-8 Review by Begoña Aretxaga Department Of Anthropology, Harvard University If there is something that Northern Ireland is known for, besides the violence of the "troubles," it is its calendric political rituals. Flute band parades march in the streets in commemoration of historical...

Museums and Indigenous Cultures

The idea of gathering things, normally beautiful things, together and putting them on display is very old. Babylonian kings had their private collections in the sixth century BC. The emperors of China and royal personages in other parts of the world certainly had collections of their own. The idea of a museum, however, comes to us from the Greek word museion, which did not originally refer to a...

Malaysian Borneo's Muzium Sarawak: A Colonial Legacy in Postcolonial Context

Malaysian Borneo's Muzium Sarawak: A Colonial Legacy in Postcolonial. Context In 1963, the state of Sarawak, located in northwest Borneo, joined the newly independent Federation of Malaysia. For independent Federation of Malaysia. For about 100 years prior, Sarawak was governed by members of the Brooke dynasty, British adventurers who acquired control over the region from the control over the...

Korea's National Museum and Colonial Experience

On December 12, 1996, Korea's National Museum reopened in its new location in Seoul, while the building that had housed its treasures for the past ten years was being prepared for destruction. The grand project of relocating the National Museum of Korea to a new site and demolishing the old building -originally built as the Governor General's Office during Japanese colonial rule-has drown...

Investing in the Past to Build a Better Future: The Copan Sculpture Museum in Honduras, Central America

Investing in the Past to Build a Better Future: The Copán Sculpture. Museum in Honduras, Central America In May 1993, the heads of state of the five countries with Maya archeological sites signed a document in which they committed their respective nations to ecological conservation, conscientious cultural resource management, and the involvement of local people in the development of tourism in...

From Hall of Worship to Tourist Center: An Ancestral Hall in Hong Kong's New Territories

From Hall of Worship to Tourist Center: An Ancestral Hall in Hong Kong's. New Territories This Year, 1997, is Heritage Year in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Tourist Association decided that this particular year was an excellent time to launch a new set of day tours highlighting temples, ancestral halls, shrines, and "traditional Chinese" buildings located in remote corners of the colony. Readers will...

Cloth That Does Not Die: The Meaning of Cloth in Bunu Social Life.

Settle and London: University of Washington Press, 1995, xxi + 269 pp., appendix, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. 10 color photographs, 25 black and white photographs, figures, tables. Review by Reinhild Kauenhoven Janzen, Department of Art and Theatre Arts, Washburn University. The universality of material and the symbolic nature of cloth was evident when Cloth That Not Die arrived while I...

Burma: South Africa of the 1990's

The Southeast Asian country of Burma is a living version of George Orwell's 1984 a country where owning a fax machine or a modern without permission from the authorities will get you thrown in jail. It is a country ruled by one of the bloodiest and most repressive regions on the planet, a regime that-according to the United Nations - considers rape, torture, execution, or public dismemberment...