Object and Identity in a Digital Age
CHArt 25th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Object and Identity in a Digital Age
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Devorah Romanek, The British Museum
Emergent questions: Digitisation, Cultural Heritage and the Social Agency of Images
The theme and analysis of the impact of the forming of museum ethnographic collections through the collecting activities of various official and unofficial colonial and European agents is by now well established, as is the impact of the resultant dispersal and fragmentation of the material culture of various peoples and cultures through actions such as collecting for and depositing in museums and archives. More recently, however, through political changes wrought by activism and subsequent changes in law (i.e. repatriation) and through changes in technology (i.e. digitisation and the internet), questions related to the impact and implications of the bringing back together of these fragmented collections of material culture to reform whole corpuses, either literally through acts of repatriation, or virtually through digitisation of collections, have begun to emerge.
This paper will investigate the emergent questions brought about by these political, cultural and technological changes in relationship to material culture, and as mediated through a cultural heritage institution, to consider what specific roles they might play in changing visual cannons of representation, and specifically, how that might impact ideas of community and identity. This paper will observe the workings of the specific knowledge transfer network that museum digitisation projects brings together in an attempt to identify where the current or new nodal points of knowledge resource might be located in the digital age, what new relationships might be facilitated or prohibited through and by the political and technological developments related to digital technology and what the bringing back together of long-fragmented collections might unleash. Museums, particularly those that hold historically fraught ethnographic collections, are at once sites of cultural transmission and identity work and places of forgetting through acts of institutionalised remembrance; however, their role as places of nascent re-remembering through digitisation have just begun to be theorised.
For the last 18 years Devorah Romanek has been working in various museums in the United States, Germany and the UK. Currently she is working on a PhD in anthropology at University College London, with a focus on visual and material culture. She also currently has a position at the British Museum, in the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas on a Getty funded project documenting and researching the museum’s photographic collections from the Pacific and Americas.