Bienniel Anthropology Public Lecture, Prof Morphy: 'Living Collections'

Event Details

Date:

Wednesday, 03 September 2014

Time:

4:30 pm - 6:00 pm

Room:

222

Location:

Lecture theatre 222, Level 2 Parnell Building (#7)

UQ Location:

Parnell Building (St Lucia)

URL:

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Professor Howard Morphy

Living Collections: researching Australian Aboriginal art and material culture

We are entering the most exciting era for museums and collections since museums became major cultural institutions in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The lecture arises reflexively out of a lifetime of engagement with ethnographic collections and focuses on a number of these that are relevant to current discourse.

The themes are both methodological and theoretical and entangled with value-creation processes. They are concerned with the value objects have for research into historical and anthropological questions and the value that the objects have in society more broadly. The lecture will be concerned with how things mean and to whom they mean in the context of change and will draw attention to the dialogue between two locals — the local of the museum where the object is curated and the local of the source community where the object originated.