ANTH 312 Museums and Cultural Property
This course will introduce students to the roles objects play in people's lives, how anthropologists and other scholars analyze those relationships, and some of the controversies that can connect material culture to different sociocultural contexts using museum collections as one focus for its analysis and debates around cultural property as its second. The class will begin with a discussion of the development of museums and consider a number of concerned raised by current museum theory and best practices, including issues including repatriation, regulation of cultural knowledge, and community collaboration, as well as the equities involved in providing broader forms of access to cultural items.
The cultural property section of the course will look to protection in the context of law, traditional systems of cultural regulation, and social equities, looking to both tangible forms (objects in museum collections and the equities around them) and intangible ones (music, traditional knowledge, and folklore). It will also explore formal and informal types of protections and policy choices that may arise for those in charge of various types of collections of ethnographic materials.