Date: 4 November 2022
Time: 14:15-16:00
Location: Lecture Hall, 4206-139
Reception from 16:00 in Moesgaard Canteen

Responses and conversation led by Magda Naum (Archaeology and Heritage Studies) and Cameron Warner (Anthropology)

Moesgaard Lectures are organised by the Research Programmes of Anthropology (RPA) and Materials-Culture-Heritage (MCH) and features speakers whose cross-disciplinary scholarship help us reflect and engage with the research fields and disciplines at Moesgaard.

Abstract: Imperial understandings of ‘race’ and racial hierarchies in museums are reflected in systems of categorisation and naming. Imperial cultural values define Maori artefacts within (English) and colonial paradigms of thought. The naming and cataloguing of Mori artefacts are embedded within a system of imperial violences that separate the production of culture from ‘Europe’ and ‘Other’. With the example of weaving, we can see how a renewed and self-determined system of naming, classification and cataloguing could reaffirm correct Maori cultural values, create more accurate scientific identification that is rightful and respectful towards Maori systems of knowledge. A re-classification of artefacts using Maori systems of knowledge in Maori language enables several challenges to Imperial cultural values and inheritances from their cultural hierarchies that are resonant in the museum cabinet. This paper addresses 'being an feeling at the museum' as a racialised other visiting the British Museum.

Bio: Divya was born in Kenya and arrived in the UK in 1973. Her research is focussed on postcolonial and anti-racist approaches to cultural geographies, migration, landscape, memory, heritage, visual culture and material culture using participatory methodologies. Divya has published several articles on the theory and politics of 'race' in relation to these themes, including decolonising the academy, ethnocentrism in cultural politics and more recently on decolonising museums and race, affect and the anthropocene. Her books published include a monograph Landscape, Race and Memory (2010); Visuality/Materiality: Objects, Images and Practices (edited with Gillian Rose) and the co-edited volume (with Steve Watson and Emma Waterton) entitled Heritage, Affect and Emotion:Politics, practices and infrastructures (2016). Divya is currently Series Editor (with Emma Waterton) of the Routledge Book Series Critical Studies in Heritage, Emotion and Affect (link) Divya is currently writing a research monograph entitled An Archaeology of Race at the Museum (contracted with Routledge) that links to the exhibition of the same name (link) developed with antiquarians, historians, curators and keepers of artefacts at Tullie House, Segedenum, Arbeia, Great North museums along Hadrian's wall.