This paper examines the exhibition process behind Pamela Masik's The Forgotten at the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology. Set to open in February 2011, the exhibition featured 69 portraits of missing and murdered women from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Masik's work is highly controversial, and the museum chose not to proceed with the exhibition after local Aboriginal activists from the Women's Memorial March intercepted the curatorial process. I argue that the way the museum staff negotiated the collaborative process reflects a contact zone mentality that has been deeply internalized in museums. This normalization of conflict poses the risk of negatively affecting relationships with communities and ought to be rethought by those in the field. [missing women, Downtown Eastside Vancouver, contact zones, controversy, colonialism, Women's Memorial March, Pamela Masik]

The rise of cultural diplomacy within Alaska Native communities has led to a renegotiation of heritage displays within mainstream museums. This article critically examines the incorporation of Bering Strait voices within two recent exhibits: Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of Bering Strait and Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage: The First Peoples of Alaska. Cross-cultural collaborations of exhibit planning and implementation are assessed through the review of museum records and commentary by Alaska Native and museum advisors. The processes of including Native voices and knowledge systems are analyzed in relation to exhibit spaces, websites, catalogues, and educational programming. With mixed efficacy, the exhibits push toward a new museology in which conventional exhibit practices are deconstructed and replaced according to indigenous, intellectual self-determination. [Alaska Native, museums, exhibits, collaboration, indigenous knowledge]

Museums around the globe are increasingly being employed to expand the practice and experience of cultural citizenship, interpreting cross-cultural connections as key to civic identity and pride. This article is an ethnographic case study of how two museums represent different visions of cultural citizenship in the ethnically diverse nation of Singapore. Viewing exhibitions as texts and drawing on interviews and interactions with museum staff, visitors, and community members as well as observations made within the museum environment, this research suggests that the two branches of Singapore's Asian Civilisations Museum—the new “Peranakan Museum” and the Empress Place Museum—can be seen as tools that are central to the promotion of government agendas of nation building and cultural citizenization in Singapore. In this article, I analyze them in terms of their embodiment of “traditional” versus “post” multicultural characteristics. [national museums, identity, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, Peranakans, Singapore]

This article takes a microhistorical approach to the creation of a national museum by exploring the everyday practices of museum guards in the early history of the Museu Etnológico Português, now known as the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia, in Lisbon, Portugal. Using documentary sources such as letters, museum regulations, and notes, I explore the agency of the museum's first guards by identifying the ways they both enacted the prescribed behaviors of the museum and also challenged and transgressed these ideals, thereby shaping the cultural space of the museum. I suggest that guards, in the early years of the museum, functioned primarily as agents for marking social boundaries and as sites where transformations in the Portuguese social order were contested and, only secondarily, as individuals charged with protecting the security of objects. [Portugal, museum guards, microhistory, agency, national museums]

When antique wooden saints were offered for sale in a Hanoi shop window, they provoked uncomfortable responses from Catholic observers living outside Vietnam who could not imagine their co-religionists voluntarily selling statues that had once been blessed. To explore this question—how things considered too sacred for commerce came to be sold—we bring together two usually discrete domains of research on material culture: object biographies that trace their movement from local sites of production and use into global markets, and studies on material religion that address how embodied and sensate encounters with the material world are productive of religious experiences and understandings. The social life of things collides with material religion at the place where statues and other religious paraphernalia are first transacted into artifact, art, folk art, or native handicraft. The bridge between these two domains of inquiry is the recognition that object biographies are propelled in part by notions of object agency that assume particular protocols for interactions between people and things. [Vietnam, Catholicism, material religion, circulation of goods, sacred objects, statues]