Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond looks anew at the lives, effects and possibilities of things. Starting from the perspectives of things themselves, it outlines a particular, displacement approach to the museum, anthropology and material culture. The book explores the ways in which the objects are experienced in their present, displaced settings, and the implications and potentialities they carry. It offers insights into matters of difference and the hope that may be offered by transformative encounters between persons and things. Drawing on anthropological studies of ritual to conceptualise and examine displacement and its implications and possibilities, Dudley develops her arguments through exploration of displaced objects now in museums and dislocated or exiled from their prior geographical, historical, cultural, intellectual and personal contexts. The book’s approach and conclusions are relevant far beyond the museum, showing that even in the most difficult of circumstances there is agency, distinction and dignity in the choices and impacts that are made, and that things and places as well as people have efficacy and potency in those choices. In Displaced Things, displacement emerges as fundamental to understanding the lives of things and their relationships with human beings, and the places, however defined, that they make and pass within. The book will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of museums, heritage, anthropology, culture and history.

Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond looks anew at the lives, effects and possibilities of things. Starting from the perspectives of things themselves, it outlines a particular, displacement approach to the museum, anthropology and material culture. The book explores the ways in which the objects are experienced in their present, displaced settings, and the implications and potentialities they carry. It offers insights into matters of difference and the hope that may be offered by transformative encounters between persons and things. Drawing on anthropological studies of ritual to conceptualise and examine displacement and its implications and possibilities, Dudley develops her arguments through exploration of displaced objects now in museums and dislocated or exiled from their prior geographical, historical, cultural, intellectual and personal contexts. The book’s approach and conclusions are relevant far beyond the museum, showing that even in the most difficult of circumstances there is agency, distinction and dignity in the choices and impacts that are made, and that things and places as well as people have efficacy and potency in those choices. In Displaced Things, displacement emerges as fundamental to understanding the lives of things and their relationships with human beings, and the places, however defined, that they make and pass within. The book will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of museums, heritage, anthropology, culture and history.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. How can Archaeology help us understand our contemporary world? This ground-breaking book reflects on material, visual and digital culture from the Calais “Jungle” – the informal camp where, before its destruction in October 2016, more than 10,000 displaced people lived. LANDE: The Calais 'Jungle' and Beyond reassesses how we understand ‘crisis’, activism, and the infrastructure of national borders in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, foregrounding the politics of environments, time, and the ongoing legacies of empire. Introducing a major collaborative exhibit at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the book argues that an anthropological focus on duration, impermanence and traces of the most recent past can recentre the ongoing human experiences of displacement in Europe today.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. How can Archaeology help us understand our contemporary world? This ground-breaking book reflects on material, visual and digital culture from the Calais “Jungle” – the informal camp where, before its destruction in October 2016, more than 10,000 displaced people lived. LANDE: The Calais 'Jungle' and Beyond reassesses how we understand ‘crisis’, activism, and the infrastructure of national borders in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, foregrounding the politics of environments, time, and the ongoing legacies of empire. Introducing a major collaborative exhibit at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the book argues that an anthropological focus on duration, impermanence and traces of the most recent past can recentre the ongoing human experiences of displacement in Europe today.

Hundreds of thousands of works of art and artefacts from many parts of the Pacific are dispersed across European museums. They range from seemingly quotidian things such as fish-hooks and baskets to great sculptures of divinities, architectural forms and canoes. These collections constitute a remarkable resource for understanding history and society across Oceania, cross-cultural encounters since the voyages of Captain Cook, and the colonial transformations that have taken place since. They are also collections of profound importance for Islanders today, who have varied responses to their disp.

The book, Objects of War, illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement.― Utah Public Radio Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. And yet the profession tends to be suspicious of things; words are its stock-in-trade. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is the radical destruction and transformation of the material world. And yet we know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in flight; objects stolen on battlefields; objects expropriated, reappropriated, and remembered. Objects of War illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement. Chapters consider theft and pillaging as strategies of conquest; soldiers' relationships with their weapons; and the use of clothing and domestic goods by prisoners of war, extermination camp inmates, freed people, and refugees to make claims and to create a kind of normalcy. While studies of migration and material culture have proliferated in recent years, as have histories of the Napoleonic, colonial, World Wars, and postcolonial wars, few have focused on the movement of people and things in times of war across two centuries. This focus, in combination with a broad temporal canvas, serves historians and others well as they seek to push beyond the written word. Contributors: Noah Benninga, Sandra H. Dudley, Bonnie Effros, Cathleen M. Giustino, Alice Goff, Gerdien Jonker, Aubrey Pomerance, Iris Rachamimov, Brandon M. Schechter, Jeffrey Wallen, and Sarah Jones Weicksel