Museum Anthropology

Welcome to Museum Anthropology page!

Here we discuss issues pertaining to the anthropology of museums, private collections, and archives. However the leitmotif for this section are not the conventional museums but the museums of American Indian cultures organized by Indianists in Europe. For the most part, these museums exhibit “Indian” objects manufactured by Indianists, but occasional gifts from Native Americans or commercial artifacts acquired through travel make their way there too. Indianist museums combine, therefore, features of conventional imperial museums and more recent tribal museums. They add new complexity to the problem of the repatriation of Native American cultural objects and pose questions of cultural identity, belonging, and authenticity. Do replicas of traditional Native American artifacts (including objects of worship) belong to Native American communities? If yes, then can people who manufacture them be considered part of those comunities? Some of the examples of Indianist museums include

“The Indian Museum named after Sat-Okh”

(near Tuchola, Poland)

Sat-Okh Museum

Arkady Fiedler’s Museum and Workshop

(Puszczykowo, Poland)

Fiedler-Museum

The Museum of Lakota Culture

(Bastogne, Belgium)

Belgium Museum