Week 1 Readings

The readings over the past three weeks have been a combination of articles specific to the Museum of Anthropology and more general articles on the responsibilities of museums.

For our first week of readings, we had:

-"Notes on the History of the Museum of Man" by E.P. Banks

-"Anthropology at Wake Forest University: 1954-1982" by E. Pendleton Banks

-"Part II A Safer Place: Museums in a Civil Society; Ch. 7: The Museum as a Socially Responsible Institution, 1988" in Civilizing the Museum: Collected Writings of Elaine Heumann Gurian by Elaine Heumann Gurian

-"An Anthropological Definition of the Museum and its Purpose" by Richard Handler 

E.P Banks' works dealt with the history of the Museum of Anthropology and the Department of Anthropology. These articles were good brief introductions to the denser, more detailed article on the MOA's history by Beverlye Hancock.

The latter two articles addressed problems facing museums in general, particularly that of bias. Handler highlights the importance of thought and care in organizing an exhibit since interpretations and bias will always be present in the display. Gurian offers an excellent list of questions to ask yourself when building a display to address the problems of interpretation. These questions focus on issues including ones like reflecting diversity and considering the interests of the target audience. 

The idea of a target audience was particularly important for me to consider as I built my timeline. When choosing events, I had to be mindful that the timeline exhibit is geared towards a diverse group comprised of students, faculty and general public, who are of all ages. This made it difficult to decide what I should include or not. I tried to focus on events that showed the evolution of the museum to what it is today because I thought would be of interest to the adult audience (high school and up) as they have probably interacted with the Museum on more than one occasion. I thought they might find it interesting to see how traditions like the Day of the Dead exhibit started. For the younger audience, I tried to pick events that had a variety of good photographs that could keep them engaged through all the text. 

Even with a target audience in mind, it was very difficult to select events and I am looking forward to collaborating with Demone on Thursday to see what he chose to record and to further work on narrowing down and editing the timeline.