Browsing by Author "Hendricks, Lisa Victoria"

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    The social life of a small ethnology museum in Limpopo, South Africa
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-12) Hendricks, Lisa Victoria; Van Wyk, Ilana; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This mini-ethnography is concerned with a small-town ethnology museum, the Aranya Museum, and the various actors that entered and engaged with the museum and its artefacts during a period of transition, which started with the death of its long-time curator. The museum, like many others in South Africa, was founded by a lone man and was animated by a colonial collecting ethic that had become deeply unfashionable post-apartheid. Indeed, the literature shows a radical shift in museum collecting practices that has seen “source communities” becoming involved in and laying claim to their ethnic heritage in such ethnology collections. Contrary to this trend, the Aranya Museum held little interest for the museum’s “source communities” who expressed no intention to appropriate or reclaim ‘their’ indigenous artefacts. Instead, local white, wealthy and landed businessmen became publicly invested in this seemingly inconsequential museum precisely because it contained artefacts of the area’s black communities; artefacts which were, at the time of my research, susceptible to appropriation. In the context of looming land claims and racial tensions in this small town, this appropriation was in opposition to the interests of people whose ethnic identity and heritage were contained in the museum. Inspired by Appadurai’s (1986) The Social Life of Things, I show how this literally and symbolically set the collection and its personnel in motion. At the same time, the “source community’s” dynamic understanding of heritage and of tourism has given rise to plans for possible new ethnology museums in the area, mapping onto existing political and economic divisions within the community.