Indigenous Curation and Appropriate Museology: Examples from Indonesia

Speaker: Dr. Christina Kreps, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Director of Museum of Anthropology, Museum and Heritage Studies

The idea of the museum is typically considered a modern and Western cultural product. However, people throughout the world and since ancient times have had ways of taking care of and passing on their tangible and intangible heritage, or In Miriam Clavir’s words, “what they value.” In this session, Christina Kreps presents examples of Indigenous curatorial methods, models of museums, and approaches to heritage preservation in Indonesia. She also discusses the idea of “appropriate museology”—the adaptation of professional museum practices to particular cultural, social, and economic contexts—and the importance of this mixing to making museums meaningful to communities, and thus, sustainable.

Curating Bangsamoro Textiles from the Periphery: The Centrality of Material Culture in Context and Intersecting Community Discourses

Speaker: Dr.Ana Maria Theresa P. Labrador, Honorary Senior Fellow of the University of Melbourne’s School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. External Advisory Board Member, ReConnect/ReCollect Project: Reparative Connections to Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan.

In my experiences in curating Bangsamoro textiles, creating inclusive research and public programs served to re-interpret and re-contextualize historical collections. This has meant doing away with preconceived notions and classifications that may have been rooted in their colonial paradigms. Developing local repatriation programs for objects taken from their source communities and having community artists and artisans gain access to them not only reacquaint ancestral knowledge of making and meaning but also develops a self-consciousness of their own value. In this lecture, I am proposing that the periphery can then become central within the context of their material culture and practice, serving to develop resistance to the dominant discourses from the urban centers that may bear alien and alienating canons. This curatorial practice is a work in progress and may only succeed in the spirit of collaboration and mutual respect.