"There will be many stories": museum anthropology, collaboration, and the Tlicho
Museum anthropology, which can involve any or all of anthropology’s subfields, is largely a performative, interdisciplinary enterprise using collaborative methods while engaged with knowledgeable and skilled members of the community, and involves creating new narratives about things of interest to the partners and wider public. This study interlinks applied anthropology, ethnography, ethnohistory, Indigenous archaeology, art, museums as places of interaction, and cultural revitalization, through the description of creative collaborative projects undertaken in partnership with Tli?cho? and other Dene elders, artists, and other skilled practitioners between 1990 and 2011 by staff of the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. Exploring themes in the ontology and materiality of objects, relationships between humans and animals, links between technology and cosmology, the epistemology and ontology of Dene conceptions and experiences of the environment and ways of knowing, the composition of new landscapes through art, and the epistemological role of stories in the transmission of knowledge, the study demonstrates that these creative practices are performative and allow collaborators to engage in new ways of knowing, while building trust and respect between participants.
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