MUSEUM METHODS

Welcome to blog central for ANTH 177 (Spring 2014). Students in this course maintain individual blogs in order to record their weekly lab hours and summaries, journal their brilliant thoughts about our readings, discuss our exhibit and inventory project, and generate discussion about museum-related issues, events or opportunities. This is a nuts and bolts course that complements ANTH 176: Museums, Culture & Society (an introduction to the scholarly field of museum anthropology).

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Monday, March 10, 2014

George's Paternal Grandfather

Our exhibit title, Sentiment and Science, is turning out to have deeper relevance than we might have anticipated. Amos F. Beardsley, Sr. (GF's British-born grandfather) was not only a surgeon, he was

a member of the Victoria Institute (aka Philosophical Society of Great Britain), founded in 1865
a Fellow of the Linnean Society
and a Fellow of the Geological Society

The Victoria Institute was trying to reconcile the Bible with the geological evidence of the time. While they were clearly committed to making them "square" with one another, it doesn't appear that they were all catastrophists (according to some of the Transactions I've read today), which brings us back to Lyell's Principle of Uniformitarianism, and to the Mount Lyell Mining Company in Tasmania. See what I did, there?

You can read the Google e-book Faith and Thought, Journal of the Victoria Institute to find out more (Parallel Lives Team).

The Social Biography of Things

Do you collect souvenirs or ephemera from your everyday life and travels? Or, if you've been lucky enough, from some sojourn abroad? Where will these things end up a century from now? In an estate sale, antique store, or the home of your heirs? Perhaps in the hands of a student researcher like yourself? What kind of stories will they tell? One that reflects your own life history, means and sensibilities? The aesthetic and technological roots of their manufacture? Their own peripatetic lives as bits of material culture? The nascent years of the locale and institution in which they have momentarily come to rest? These are questions that matter in museum anthropology. And they are central to this collection and course.