Collecting Korean shamanism for the National Museum of Denmark: ethnographic objects as collecting devices

Authors

  • Martin Petersen

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5617/nm.3128

Keywords:

museum anthropology, social agency, Korea, shamanism, ethnographic collecting, National Museum of Denmark

Abstract

It is a basic undertaking amongst museum professionals who work with various aspects of a collection’s meaning, interpretation and history to explore the biography of a historical museum object. This article attempts to depart from this by conceptualizing historical, ethnographic objects as ‘collecting devices’. The focus is thereby shifted from the historiography of an ethnographic object to the ways in which an object and its history can be employed as a device in staging new empirical fields for the museum anthropologist. This points toward potentials inherent to the ethnographic museum, namely the possibility that museum professionals and visitors alike can employ ethnographic objects as a means of encountering people outside the museum and everyday social world that they inhabit. 

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Issue

No. 2 (2011)

Section

Articles

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