Following this year's meeting theme [Nov. 2012 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association], this panel will consider contemporary borders and crossings in the museum institution. Like anthropology itself, museums are increasingly defined by the collision of diverse knowledges or expertises, theorized as contact zones (Clifford 1997) characterized by 'mediated knowledges' (Isaac 2007) or frictions (Karp & Levine 2006; Tsing 2005) and necessarily based on diverse collaborations. They are also, like anthropology, changing in an increasingly neoliberal, globalized, and digital world. The museum apparatus the heterogeneous set of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions (Foucault 1980, 194) that shape museological behaviours and knowledgesis in flux. Following the conferences call, we therefore hope to interrogate the structures, genealogies and technological changes that have shaped museums and continue to shape our research questions, methodological choices, and subsequent interventions in museum institutions.
Some themes/trends to consider:
-The impacts of cross-cultural and indigenous epistemologies
-The professionalization and departmentalization of museums
-Museums and audit cultures (Strathern 2000)
-Movements between art and anthropology, or other blending of historically separated museum content
-The changing role of objects or digital objects in the museum
-Shifting borders of the museum, museumscapes (Clifford 1997) and/or impacts of digital technologies
-Interdisciplinarity or collaboration as method in the museum
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