Wiley: Museum Anthropology: Table of Contents

Dancing Down the Eyelashes of the Sun: Nuxalk Governance, Language, and the Museum Public

Cheyanne Brown Armstrong, Mark Turin — Thu, 14 May 2026 22:16:45 -0700

ABSTRACT

This review suggests that Nuxalk Strong: Dancing Down the Eyelashes of the Sun reframes the ethnographic gallery as a site of protocol rather than as a trophy case. Co-curated by Snxakila—Clyde Tallio (Nuxalk Nation) and Jennifer Kramer (UBC MOA), the exhibition centers law, lineage, and language to present belongings and supernatural beings as ongoing relations. Contemporary makers stand beside ancestral treasures; Nuxalk Radio and interactive bilingual spaces turn sound and speech into reflections of sovereignty; and intentional returns—most notably of masks and weavings linked to the McIlwraith collections—are treated as part of the interpretive arc of engaged and community-facing scholarship, not as backstage logistics. We celebrate the juridical-ceremonial method, the clear pedagogy of governance, and the refusal to romanticize both loss or return, and note productive tensions around acoustics and attention in this multi-modal gallery. Taken together, the exhibit's careful choreography of law, story, and material and immaterial culture models the kind of ethical partnership in which authority remains with families, ancestors, supernatural beings, and belongings and collections continue to work and circulate in the world.

Museum Temporalities: Time, History and the Future of the (Ethnographic) MuseumBy Wayne Modest and Peter Pels (eds.), London: Routledge, 2025. 294 pp. ISBN: 978‐1‐35‐010314‐6. $200.00 USD (hardcover), ISBN: 978‐1‐00‐308616‐1. $52.69 USD (ebook)

Macarena Pérez Selman — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:19:55 -0700

Museum Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 2, Fall 2026.

Reimagining the Pacific: Voces del Pacífico: Tradición e Innovación Exhibition at CaixaForum Madrid

Alba Ferrandiz‐Gaudens — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

ABSTRACT

This is a review of the Voces del Pacífico: Tradición e Innovación (Islanders: the art of life in Oceania) exhibition at CaixaForum Madrid (Spain), commissioned by the institution to the British Museum and curated by the British Museum's Oceania Curator Julie Adams.

National Relics: Secular Sacrality, Museums, and Heritage‐Making in Nineteenth‐Century Chile

Hugo Rueda Ramírez — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 05:24:16 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article examines how objects and bodily remains are transformed and ritualized into national relics through collecting and exhibiting practices in museums. Focusing on nineteenth-century Chile, it draws on archival sources, material culture theory, and the anthropology of religion to argue that objects associated with Chile's nation-state foundational figures have been sacralized through museological practices that closely mirror religious ritual. These relics, whether body parts, material traces, or personal belongings, function not merely as historical artifacts but as secular sacra: vestiges imbued with sacred national significance. The article introduces the concept of the logic of the relic to map the transformation of ordinary items into vehicles of collective memory and patriotic belief. Tracing this logic from the nineteenth century to the present, it reveals the dual role of museum practices as both secular repositories and ritual media. By challenging triumphalist narratives and questioning conventional claims about the historical value of certain materials, this study contributes to interdisciplinary debates on the role of material culture and museums in postcolonial nation-building contexts, as well as to debates on museums as sites of secular belief rather than mere representation.

Issue Information

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Museum Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 2, Fall 2026.