Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod will deliver the inaugural Fredrik Barth Lecture at Boston University on “Museum Politics & the Problem of Voice,” on Wednesday, April 19th 2023, at 4pm, with a reception to follow.
Abstract: Although politically and ethically crucial, the recent ferment around decolonizing museums and anthropology--including debates about colonial violence, repatriation, restitution, philanthrocapitalism, and reform through inclusion of community “voices”---risks erasing differences among types and missions of museums, ignoring limits of reform in institutions of public education, and downplaying emotional and intellectual attachments of visitors to museums. Reflecting on my own engagements with museums as I was growing up; my resistance to broadsides about metropolitan museums misapplied to the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit (about which I know something of the dynamics and history); and the challenges of participating in the conceptual development of a major exhibit in 2022 on nomadic pastoralism at the National Museum of Qatar—I suggest that we might make room for cautious ambivalence in these debates.
Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor at Columbia University, teaching in the Department of Anthropology and at the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. She is the author, editor or co-editor of numerous books and articles including Veiled Sentiments; Writing Women's Worlds; Dramas of Nationhood; Do Muslim Women Need Saving? and most recently The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism (Duke University Press, 2023), co-edited with Rema Hammami and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and based on a collaborative project through the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia. Alongside work based on long term ethnography in Egypt and engagement with feminist issues within and beyond anthropology, she has explored issues of memory and violence in Palestine (Nakba) and museum politics in settler colonial states. Participation in the development of a major exhibit in 2022 at the National Museum of Qatar on nomadic pastoralists is leading her to reflect on debates about the ethics, politics, and limits of the museum as a forum for public education.
The Fredrik Barth Lecture series is intended to foster discussion and debate on the relationship between individual knowledge and action in the world in the context of contemporary complex societies.
Our colleague Fredrik Barth reminded us that social life is an action-based exercise in problem solving and life-course making. Barth saw the processes of social life as grounded in the efforts of ordinary actors to create a way of life and a sense of themselves in the mobile, pluralized, and participatory circumstances of the modern world. It is this unassuming but foundational reality that made Barth's presence in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University so consequential: he taught us to recognize the play of forces and structures at work in human societies, while reminding us never to lose sight of the equally vital reality of human deliberation and freedom.
