17 Jul 2023 - 18 Jul 2023 | Philipp Schorch, Daniel Simpson, Nicholas Thomas et al.
Museum Futures: Material cultures of ethnography and natural history as archives of environmental knowledge
Given the dramatic impact of human action on the environment, evidenced in climate change and biodiversity loss, it has been widely recognised that humanity needs to reimagine its environmental relations. Yet, the deeply entrenched separation of concepts of 'culture' and 'nature' in Western thought and museums forms a major impediment. Western institutions and legal frameworks define and govern sites of 'natural' and/or 'cultural' significance; meanwhile, museums promote 'cultural' and/or 'natural' heritage. Reflecting recent and ongoing efforts to deconstruct the 'nature/culture' divide, and to creatively reimagine museum collections as archives of environmental knowledge, this workshop will bring together researchers and museum practitioners from Cambridge and beyond to consider how the museums of the future might lead the way in reimagining and reconceptualising human-environment relations.
Advocating a cross-disciplinary approach across anthropology, the arts and natural history, the workshop will explore three pressing questions: 1) as knowledge-producing institutions, how were museums historically implicated in the conceptual and actual segregation of 'natural' and 'cultural' knowledge, and to what extent does this continue to be the case? 2) how can we materialise the human-environment relations conserved in material things, such as Indigenous 'artefacts' and 'specimens', and access the novel insights they represent across different systems of being and knowing, such as Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies? 3) in what ways can novel forms of scholarly engagement, curatorship and experimental exhibitions reactivate historical collections as creative technologies, and so promote the re-imagination of human-environmental relations on a larger scale?