A vibrant cultural history.
How to exhibit humankind.
British anthropologist Kuper brings an authoritative perspective to his vigorous examination of ethnography and anthropology museums, which emerged in Europe and the U.S. in the mid-1800s. These venues displayed “an exotic world of ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ peoples who lived far away or long ago.” As European nations expanded their empires into Oceania and Africa and the U.S. extended itself west of the Mississippi, collectors made off with all manner of artifacts. Early British, French, and German museums often reflected a collector’s vision and the sheer abundance of their discoveries. Museums presented not only cabinets of curiosities and pillaged souvenirs, but evidence of the superiority of civilized cultures—evidence, that is, of Western progress from savage origins. The advent of evolutionary theory, though controversial, led some museums to reconsider that idea, organizing collections into cultural or geographical areas rather than on a timeline. Gradually, museums came to rely on anthropologists and ethnographers, although experts often clashed over the meaning of artifacts and the mission of a museum itself. Kuper’s deeply researched history is enlivened with sharply delineated profiles of figures such as anti-Darwinist Louis Agassiz, naturalist Jeffries Wyman, and James Smithson, the illegitimate son of a British aristocrat who willed his small fortune to the U.S. for the establishment of an institution devoted to “the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” After much haggling, Congress agreed to fund the Smithsonian Institution. The intellectual and political debates that roiled museums grew heated by the 1960s, when a “cauldron of controversy” arose “about race, colonialism, cultural appropriation and the very nature of scientific authority.” Claims for restitution of artifacts and debate over scholarship versus native expertise continue to vex curators. Strongly on the side of scholarship, Kuper advocates for cosmopolitan museums that can transcend “ethnic and national identities” and “challenge boundaries.”
A vibrant cultural history.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780593700679
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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