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In 1925, Pius XI staged the Vatican Missionary Exposition in Rome’s Vatican City. Offering a narrative of the Catholic Church’s beneficence to a global congregation, the exposition displayed thousands of cultural belongings stolen from Indigenous communities, which were seen by one million pilgrims. Gloria Jane Bell’s Eternal Sovereigns offers critical revision to that story. Bell reveals the tenacity, mobility, and reception of Indigenous artists, travelers, and activists in 1920s Rome. Animating these conjunctures, the book foregrounds competing claims to sovereignty from Indigenous and papal perspectives. Bell deftly juxtaposes the “Indian Museum” of nineteenth-century sculptor Ferdinand Pettrich, acquired by the Vatican, with the oeuvre of Indigenous artist Edmonia Lewis. Focusing on Turtle Island, Bell analyzes Indigenous cultural belongings made by artists from nations including Cree, Lakota, Anishinaabe, Nipissing, Kanien’kehá:ka, Wolastoqiyik, and Kwakwaka’wakw. Drawing on years of archival research and field interviews, Bell provides insight into the Catholic Church’s colonial collecting and its ongoing ethnological display practices. Written in a voice that questions the academy’s staid conventions, the book reclaims Indigenous belongings and other stolen treasures that remain imprisoned in the stronghold of the Vatican Museums.

Posterity Is Now is about doing—about how to do—museum anthropology, collections stewardship, and collaborative research based on working in collaboration with Indigenous communities. Guided by values-centered practice, this book shows how following Indigenous communities’ lead, being flexible, and creating a welcoming environment to build essential relationships can reorient museums to support cultural continuity instead of merely preserving objects.
 
In this handbook based on over twenty years of teaching and practice at the intersection of museums, anthropology, and Indigenous peoples, Jennifer A. Shannon covers both the theoretical (i.e., exploring the idea of objects as kin) and the pragmatic (i.e., guidelines for how to design and budget collaborative projects). She advocates for fundamental change in how anthropological research design and practice are done within and beyond the museum and how leadership and staff view the very purpose of the museum. She also demonstrates how collaborative museum anthropology can be a model for the fields of anthropology, public scholarship, and social science research more broadly.
 
Posterity Is Now is a starting point, a “companion to practice,” written in accessible language and equally relevant for use in university classrooms, by qualitative researchers, and by practitioners in museums and cultural centers.
 

In 1930, Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History commissioned sculptor Malvina Hoffman to produce three-dimensional models of racial types for an anthropology display called The Races of Mankind. Marianne Kinkel’s cultural biography of the long-running exhibition measures how Hoffman’s ninety-one bronze and stone sculptures impacted perceptions of race in twentieth-century visual culture. Kinkel looks at how Hoffman's collaborations with curators and anthropologists transformed the commission from a traditional physical anthropology display into a fine art exhibit. She also tracks appearances of statuettes of the works in New York and Paris exhibitions and looks at how publishers used images of the sculptures to illustrate atlases, maps, and encyclopedias. The volume concludes with the dismantling of the exhibit in 1969 and the Field Museum’s redeployment of some of the sculptures in new educational settings.

A fascinating cultural history, Races of Mankind examines how we continually re-negotiate the veracity of race through collaborative processes involved in the production, display, and circulation of visual representations.

Amid calls for decolonization and digital innovation, this necessary work explores the shifting histories and futures of ethnographic museums worldwide.

Ethnographic museums are at a crossroads; caught between colonial legacies, and the difficulties of captivating new audiences in a digital world. Reframing the Ethnographic Museum brings together leading scholars and curators to study the shifting role of these institutions in a rapidly changing cultural and political landscape. From Asia to Africa, the book explores how different museum strategies have grappled with decolonization and digital transformation, engaging in critical analysis and including case studies of innovative curatorial practices.

As museums confront calls for accountability and reconsider their collections, this volume provides a relevant exploration of the dilemmas and possibilities facing ethnographic display today. Reframing the Ethnographic Museum urges us to rethink how we engage with the past, and how museums can become spaces of dialogue and reflection.

In early twentieth-century Berlin, Wilhelm von Bode sparked a controversy with his sweeping proposal to reorganize a group of the city’s museums. Debates about the role and structure of museums played out in 1907 and 1910 with two striking series of articles that appeared in the journal Museumskunde: Journal for the Administration and Technology of Public and Private Collections. The first was a six-part essay by Otto Lauffer on history museums, and the second was a ten-part piece by Oswald Richter regarding ethnographic museums. Together, they initiated a century of significant dialogue.

The Museum in the Cultural Sciences offers the first full English translations of these articles, which remain influential in conversations about the implications of art, historical, and ethnographic museums. They show how sophisticated the discussion of museums and museum display was in the early twentieth century and how much could be gained from revisiting these reflections today. Accompanied by short commentaries from museum professionals, these articles offer an intervention into and intensification of the current debate about the function and purpose of museums.