Cultural artifacts & Why to have a World to collect them.
A cultural artifact is an object created by man which inherently gives cultural clues about the person who made it and the person who uses it. The artifact may change over time in what it represents, how it appears and how and why it is used as the culture changes over time. Cultural Artifacts (Long Beach Library)
Taking into account this definition and based on the following premises I want to know what are the different cultural artifacts people from different places and origins considered important for them?; What are the meaning they attach to them? How they organized their cultural artifacts within a shared vertically opened and horizontally limited space? What are the different “rules of play” that emerge from sharing, locating and organizing that shared space?
“Artifacts are essential to any museum, on the other hand objects do not speak for themselves. There is, in my view, a clear connection between artifacts and knowledge, and they are equally important. The knowledge we are talking about derive primarily from people, the indigenous voice if you wish, based on the researcher´s first hand observations. It is impossible to contextualize objects in a satisfactory way unless one combines objects and words; which, according to Julie Cruikshank (1992), points to physical manifestations of ideas paired with linguistic expression of ideas. Only then is it possible to view objects in different cultural settings, i.e. contextualizing the objects…”.
“…Museums have recently been referred to as knowledge-making institutions (Pat Erikson, 2002). The collection of artifacts once obtained and the knowledge attached to them gathered through research processes produce new knowledge and insight. Ethnographic museums have a special obligation getting engaged in such knowledge-generating processes. This is part of the challenge Ethnographic museums are facing today, in particular as the traditional knowledge related to various objects rapidly disappear when people managing traditional knowledge, frequently called elders, pass away. This is the reason why elders´oral history generally is so crucial as it helps to bring artifacts to life. Oral history reveals memory and perception, essential aspects in adding culture-specific meaning to the objects.”
Dr. Tom G. Svensson
Ethnographic Museum, Oslo, Norway
t.g.svensson@ukm.uio.no. Paper presented at the conference Cultural Traditions in Danger of Disappearing in Contemporary Society - A Challenge for Museums
Sibiu, Romania. September 26-30, 2003
Knowledge and Artifacts – People and Objects, on Cultural Traditions and Researched Based Collecting
See Also:
The History, Mystery, and Diversity of India
The mirror and the tomb: Africa, museums, and memory