This course is not currently offered, please contact the school or faculty of your program.

Course description

ANTH3208 is an advanced, 2 unit course focusing on museums and museum anthropology using the specific facilities available in the UQ Anthropology Museum. Objects (things) held in museum collections are especially rich with potentials. This course provides a unique opportunity to discover how to carry out your own research project on an item of your choosing from the UQ Anthropology Museum collection. The course provides a critical consideration of key contemporary theories in museum anthropology that enable students to learn how to integrate theory and practice and experiment with these through their own object case study. The course guides students through theory and methods to complete a research project on a museum object. Key theories critically discussed and applied in this course include cultural property, digital media, object analysis through handling and observation, the problems of the classification of museum objects, materials identification and their relationship to landscapes, archival research methods, online research methods and the role of museum anthropology in the history of anthropology and ethnography, and the role of anthropology museums today. This course takes as its starting point that museums are fieldwork sites with specific cultures, social relationships and institutional histories, aspects that can be researched through museum objects. This UQ campus museum founded in 1948 is the largest university collection of its kind on Australia with an emphasis on the cultural property of Australian Aboriginal and Pasifika groups and individuals with other smaller collections from south east Asia and east Africa. There is also a large photographic collection and a media collection and a large lithic collection. Materials used in collection objects frequently include feathers, stone, timber, plant fibers, shells, seeds, metals and glass.