Collections as Relations Contestations of Belonging, Cultural Heritage, and Knowledge Infrastructures

• Main Authors: Dilger, Hansjörg, Göbel, Barbara, Koch, Lars-Christian, Schütze, Stephanie, von Poser, Alexis
• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Routledge 2025; Taylor & Francis; Taylor & Francis Group
• Edition: 1
• Series: Routledge Studies in Anthropology and Museums
• Subjects: Anthropology; Art objects; Cultural property; Cultural property-Philosophy; global art history; heritage studies; History of art; Library and information sciences / Museology; Museology and heritage studies; Museum objects; museum studies; Museum techniques; Nonfiction; Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary subjects; Social and cultural anthropology; Social Science; Society and Social Sciences; Sociology; Sociology and anthropology; The Arts; The arts: general topics; The Arts: treatments and subjects; global art history; museum studies; anthropology; heritage studies
• ISBN: 9781032382555; 9781032440248; 1032440244; 1032382554; 1040210074; 9781040210079; 9781040210024; 1003370020; 1040210023; 9781003370024
• DOI: 10.4324/9781003370024

This book explores anthropological and global art collections as a catalyst, a medium, and an expression of relations. Relations-between and among objects and media, people, and material and immaterial contexts-define, configure, and potentially transform collection-related social and professional networks, discourses and practices, and increasingly museums and other collecting institutions themselves. The contributors argue that a focus on the-often contested-making and remaking of relations provides a unique conceptual entrypoint for understanding collections'-and 'their' objects' and media's-complex histories, contemporary webs of interactions, and potential futures. The chapters examine the local, translocal, and transregional relations of collections with regard to their affective, aesthetic, performative, and socio-moral qualities and situate them in the larger geopolitical constellations of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial settings. Together they investigate ongoing shifts in the relations of collections and collecting institutions by identifying alternative approaches to conceive of, and deal with, anthropological and global art collections, objects, and media in the future. The book is of interest to scholars from anthropology, global art history, museum studies, and heritage studies.