ANTH 250 QUIZ #3

Definitions
Appropriate Museology (per Kreps)
Kreps coins the term appropriate museology for the process of
adapting museum practices and cultural heritage preservation
strategies to local cultural contexts and socioeconomic conditions.

Cultural Exception
France introduced this concept at GATT in 1993.
It stems from concerns that applying GATT principles to cultural
goods and services
undermined their unique status in favor of commercial aspects.
The purpose is to treat cultural goods and services differently from
other traded goods and services due to intrinsic differences.
This allows countries to maintain tariffs and quotas to protection their
national market from other nations cultural products.
The idea of cultural exception has gradually been replaced with the
concept of cultural diversity, which still allows member states to apply
policies and measures that exclude cultural goods and services from
international trade agreements.

Repatriation
They involve ideas of repatriation and restitution, arguments for/
against return of cultural
property, and looting, damage and destruction.
Repatriation is the process whereby specific kinds of American Indian
cultural items in a museum collection are returned to lineal
descendants and culturally affiliated Indian tribes, Alaska Native clans
or villages, and/or Native Hawaiian organizations. Human remains,
funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony are
all materials that may be considered for repatriation.

List
A condition for the appropriate museology to be sustainable
Appropriate museology is an extension of new museology, which
focuses on museum social roles and democratization of practices.
It considers the human or cultural dimension in international
development, drawing on ideas of appropriate technology,
participation and intangible heritage.
Its premise is that people act to conserve and enhance their
communitys collective heritage in culturally specific ways.
This suggests that no single set of curatorial practices is universally
applicable/appropriate.
It also suggests that development efforts with museums will be
sustainable/successful only
when they take local values, traditions, knowledge and resources into
account.

2 of 5 internal forces that keep museums from becoming different

from each other
Forces that kept museums from becoming so different that they were
no longer a group:
1. Nearly universal notion of museum purpose
2. Shared idea of how people use museums
 3. Funding and rules that cross-cut location
4. Institutionalization of museum operations
5. Professionalization of museum workers

1 of 4 dilemmas for museums resulting from the time and space

compression of globalization
As museum roles in constructing public culture change in response to
globalization, this creates dilemmas for museums in four areas:
W. Relationships to cultural tourism
X. Relationships to nationalism and regionalism
Y. The place of history, memory and culture in identity work
Z. How to address multiple hybrid identities

Compare/Contrast
Key similarity/function between museums and media
Museums and media are both involved in the production of meaning
through representation.
They both accomplish this by attaching importance to events,
processes, objects and people.
And they both are involved in constructing subjectivity and identity for
their audiences telling people what it means to be a part of a society
or community.

1 way universal values museums differ from other museums

Envisioned as development or economic catalysts, they are less tied
to objects.
Due to minimal reliance on collections, values museums have a
different relationship to
their locations they could be located anywhere.
The low barriers for creating such museums makes them ideal for
places seeking to use
cultural institutions to revitalize a region.
So place is both less and more important, the museum has a place in
urban policy, and
architecture and narrative replace objects.
The relationships of values museums to place and to cultural
consumption are very different from other kinds of museums.
Place becomes important for redeveloping specific sites, but museum
content is not tied to the sites where the museums are located.
Their stress on signature architecture means that tourists may come
to see the building, not its contents, and this can change how cultural
content is packaged.

1 way national governments can influence cultural policy

Even so, governments promote or demote cultural policies implicitly
when they allocate or
withdraw funds or tax concessions to or from the cultural sector.
Cultural policy thus can be inferred from the actions of government
with respect to cultural
activities and organizations.

How museums replenish/renew their content over time

Late 18th-early 19th c. museums were seen as educational institutions
for preparing a citizenry and promoting moral betterment.
Mid-19th and 20th c. museums were enmeshed in development
projects aimed at both urban renewal and creating industrial
manufacturing-based economies.
 Museums became forms of educational media that invented complex
display, communication and organizational technologies.
The current transformation with respect to globalization lacks this
emphasis on research.
This results in museums being more like many other forms of media
--- presenters, but not
creators, of content.
In this sense, museums cannot exist solely as media, but must include
functions that
replenish and renew the content of that media.
This is critical given the commodification of culture and the threat of
corporatization.
The need to argue that museums have economic impact forces them
to become more like
commercial enterprises, taking precedence over social and cultural
missions.