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Mummy or Corpse?

August 3, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

For years the Field Museum in Chicago has had the desiccated naked body of a child on display—at child viewing level no less—in their Inside Ancient Egypt exhibit. For over a decade I have used this as an example in lectures in my Museums, Exhibitions and Representations class as an example of the power of museums to reframe objects. Put a dead body on the street and the police will be looking for a murderer, put it behind glass in a […]

Categories: Bodies, Exhibitions and Fairs, Exhibitions and Representation, Museums, Objects of Power, Representation • Tags: Ancient Egypt, Chicago, children, corpse, display, Egypt, Field Museum, Field Museum in Chicago, mummy, museum object

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Essentializing Eastern and Western Culture Through Infographics

July 19, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

While going through some old files on my computer this morning I came across a file I had saved with a collection of graphic illustrations of differences between “Eastern” and “Western” culture. Drawn a few years back by a Chinese artist named Yang Liu in Germany, some of them are very humorous and thoughtfully executed. For folks who have experience crossing the differences between, say, China and Europe or the US, some of the images certainly seem to capture something useful. […]

Categories: Anthropology, Culture, Representation, Scripts • Tags: infographic, Liu Yang, The East, The West, visual culture, Yang Liu

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Experience Japanese Culture Free of Charge! Let’s Try!

June 9, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Just as I was heading to the gate to catch my flight leaving Narita airport I passed a last-chance culture display. In the vast neutral space of the terminal the small tatami covered stage, complete with paper screen, umbrella, lantern with Japanese characters and a koto was like some kind of cultural drinking fountain. A last sip before leaving? A final opportunity to get with Japanese culture, to collect a final experience, to take a photo. It was even free! Free culture […]

Categories: Culture, Exhibitions and Fairs, Japan, Representation, Scripts • Tags: display, Free culture, Japanese Culture, music, Narita Airport

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Mystery Object #18: Foreigner Costume

May 30, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

“Hi, I’m a foreigner.” Over twenty years ago, while shopping at a store in Japan I came across a party novelty “foreigner” (gaijin) costume set–for dressing as a foreigner at parties. In this case it meant a specific kind of foreigner. The set came complete with a large white nose and two tape-on blue eyes. I immediately bought the kit figuring that I would use it in a future anthropology class. Unfortunately the costume got lost in some move or […]

Categories: Bodies, Mystery Objects, Race, Representation, Toys • Tags: blue eyes, costume, gaijin, nose

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“Moroccan” (Tourist) Things

January 8, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Categories: Collecting, Material Culture, Photo Essays, Representation, Souvenirs, Tourism • Tags: Morocco, Orientalism, souvenir, tourism, tourist experience, travel

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Shen Yun Performing Arts as Falun Gong’s “Wild East Show”

December 13, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

This past week I went to my mailbox in the social sciences divisional office and was surprised to find every faculty mailbox had been stuffed to overflowing with a 2014 calendar of the Shen Yun dance troupe. It would be treating the “calendars” with too much respect to call them junk mail—much more respect than was shown to our faculty by the person who dumped them there—despite our administrative assistant’s warning that most would end up in the trash. We […]

Categories: "Swords and Silk", China, Mythologies, Random Reflections, Representation • Tags: Buffalo Bill, Chinese Culture, dance, Falun Gong, Orientalism, Shen Yun

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Not Playing Ping Pong Playing Ping Pong

November 27, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there…” —Jean Baudrillard (1988: 166). Yesterday a student forwarded an image to me that she found on […]

Categories: Games, Photography, Representation • Tags: analog games, Jean Baudrillard, ping pong, simulacra, simulations, skeuomorph, video games

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Faux Vintage Photos and Profound Academic Labor

September 24, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Weekly field assignments are making for a very interesting and useful pedagogical experiment in this Fall’s Introduction to Anthropology class. Reviewing and scoring the field journals each Tuesday, however, makes for some intense grading. At least taking a fake Daguerreotype photo of the pile of black Moleskine notebooks, and posting it on Facebook makes it feel like the work of grading is more profound than it might otherwise be.   UPDATE: Last night I finished evaluating the last of the journals, […]

Categories: Introduction to Anthropology, Photography, Representation, Social Class • Tags: assignments, faux vinage, school

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Detroit and the Aral Sea

September 19, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

[I was going through some old drafts of posts-never-completed this morning and decided to delete the ones I’ll likely never complete. Others, like this one are parts of ideas or beginnings of drafts that never got finished but don’t deserve to be deleted because there is something there worth keeping. So I’ve decided to just post them as-is.] A few weeks ago when we visited Detroit, all I could think about was the Aral Sea. Why would a visit to […]

Categories: End of Times, Environment, Essays, Representation • Tags: Aral Sea, Detroit, disaster

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Yungang Grottoes: The Missing Pieces Meet The Big Holes

August 15, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Oh, I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece Hi-dee-ho, here I go lookin’ for my missin’ piece –The Missing Piece (Shel Silverstein, 1976) This afternoon I was doing some cataloging of images when I came across a folder from a few years back. In it I found a few photos from the Yungang Grottoes—a collection of ancient carved buddhist grottoes just outside the city of Datong in Northern China. Every year that I take student […]

Categories: China, Collecting, Museums, Photo Essays, Representation, Tourism • Tags: chinese sculpture, collections, cultural property, Cultural Revolution, Datong, Met, Metropolitan Museum of Art, sculpture, shel silverstein, unesco world heritage site, vandalism, Yungang Grottoes,云冈石窟

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