Claudia Feigl, University of Vienna Collections Coordinator:
The research of material cultural objects holds an infinite variety of questions issues/topics that often arise in the course of dealing with objects. Provenance, production context, acquisition and use contexts of objects offer entry points into understanding past cultural practices. This lecture will focus on the conditions that must be fulfilled in order to be able to study collections in the first place. Using "accessibility" and "usability" as guiding concepts, the expectations and demands on collections by current researchers will also be addressed.
Do bring your lunch and join us for the talk and discussion!
Over the past decades, nuanced research and engagement with material objects has emerged as an important part of historical and anthropological research. Following trends emerging from the fields of history, history of science, history of anthropology, and visual and museum anthropology, this group attends to the role of collections of natural and human-made materials as catalysts or jumping off points for historical and contemporary engagements in the production of knowledge widely construed, in all time periods and geographic regions.
The Vienna-based Collections and Collecting Brown Bag Lunch Seminar aims to bring together colleagues across disciplines and foster academic discussions for regular in-person and informal seminars where work-in-progress papers and projects will be presented. We invite members to discuss how objects have been gathered, circulated, bought and sold, organized, modified, and represented. That is, how they operate in and create different systems of value and to think about the relations they embody.
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