Philipp Schorch
Biographic Data
| ID | 148985 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Philipp Schorch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Philipp |
| FAMILY NAME | Schorch |
| SIGNATURE | SCHORCH P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Deakin University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 27 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Recollecting Rapa Nui
Recollecting memories is intrinsically linked to collecting things. In this article, we focus on this material dimension of remembrance. Drawing on a historical-ethnographic investigation of Rapanui material entities - books, carvings, photographs - that are often housed in archival-museum collections, and their agency and efficacy – their effect upon human affairs through circulation – we suggest that books, carvings and photographs, in their Ra…
Using the past in the present for the future
This special issue is the culmination of several years of research and associated workshops in which professionals and scholars came together to talk about their work in and with museum and archival collections across the Pacific, the Americas and Europe. In this introduction, we discuss the conceptual frame of this issue—‘the museum as archive’—which is geared towards ‘using the past in the present and future’. Such cultural futures perspective …
Sāmoan archival-museum entanglements, (re)activations of the Vā
Introducción
Les invitamos a leer los artículos del dossier “Banderas indígenas y Estados nación” en el volumen 25 de 2025 de Si Somos Americanos. Revista de Estudios transfronterizos. Los diversos manuscritos abordan la complejidad histórica, identitaria, política y territorial que se articula en torno a las diversas banderas indígenas que encontramos en la región. Se analizan la Wiphala aymara y la del pueblo chango; la Wenufoyemapuche; así como también la …
Introduction. Souverainetés autochtones
Indigenous Sovereignties
This special issue interrogates Indigenous sovereignties across Oceania and beyond the state. Addressing the topic in the plural, involves thinking about multiple kinds of self-determination, governance practices, and institutional bodies placed beyond—within and outside, above and below—the state, as well as through scalar motions from the local to the global and temporal orientations from the past to the future. In this diversity of contexts, t…
Introduction Souverainetés autochtones
Ce numéro spécial interroge les souverainetés autochtones à travers l’Océanie et au-delà de l’État. Aborder ce sujet au pluriel implique de réfléchir à de multiples formes d’autodétermination, de pratiques de gouvernance et d’organes institutionnels placés au-delà – à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur, au-dessus et au-dessous de l’État, ainsi qu’à travers des mouvements scalaires allant du local au global et des orientations temporelles allant du pass…
What Can Museum Anthropology Do in the Twenty-first Century
This article sets out to tackle the question: 'what can museum anthropology do in the twenty-first century?' It does so by focusing on the doing in a double-sense: on what museum anthropology can do, as in affecting, impacting and achieving, as well as on museum anthropology's own doing, as a particular set of knowledge practices brimming with methodological, epistemological and ontological potentials to be harnessed for its own renewal and for c…
Re-membering Hawai'i
Material entities, mostly classified as “ethnographic objects” or “human remains”, held in German collections and museums still bear witness to the political, economic and scientific entanglements between Hawai‘i and Germany that emerged during the nineteenth century. Our article addresses the potential of (re)assembling and (re)activating these material and immaterial cultural connections – their re-membering – and argues for an understanding of…
Museum – Archive – Infrastructure
Conal McCarthy, Philipp Schorch and Nicholas Thomas introduce two ongoing research initiatives and set out to conceptually explore the nexus of museum collections, archives and infrastructures
Materielle Verflechtungsgeschichte
Um es auf den Punkt zu bringen: HistorikerInnen lesen und schreiben. 1 Die Handwerkskunst dieser Profession zeichnet sich dadurch aus, basierend auf vornehmlich schriftlichen Quellen, Texte zu verfassen, die versuchen, sich an vergangene Zeiten anzunähern und den LeserInnen so Einblicke in andere Welten zu gewähren. Für viele HistorikerInnen bietet sogar ausschließlich das geschriebene Wort scheinbar genügend Beweislast, um solide Rückschlüsse au…
Refocusing Ethnographic Museums Through Oceanic Lenses
Conclusion
Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond
Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond provides a new look at the old anthropological concern with materiality and connectivity. It understands materiality not as defined property of some-thing, nor does it take connectivity as merely a relation between discrete entities. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it sees materiality and connectivity as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or more pre…
Sensitive Heritage
This introduction lays out this special issue, which juxtaposes articles on approaches to provenance research, conducted at German museum and university institutions, with articles on past, present and future potentialities of restitutions to originating societies in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and Namibia. In doing so, the issue makes the argument that provenance research and processes of restitution, and their underlying ethical and sensiti…
Curatopia
What is the future of curatorial practice? How can the relationships between Indigenous people in the Pacific, collections in Euro-American institutions, and curatorial knowledge in museums globally be (re)conceptualised in reciprocal and symmetrical ways? Is there an ideal model, a ‘curatopia,’ whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia, which can enable the reinvention of ethnographic museums and address their difficult colonial legacies? This…
Interpreting a Tatanua Mask
This article introduces the art historical method of functional deixis into the study of material culture in anthropology. Functional deixis begins with a thorough empirical description of communicative effects—visual and embodied—produced by a material thing on the beholder. It then proceeds by tending to a kind of formalisation that enables us, on the one hand, to sharpen our intuitive reaction to the thing and, on the other, to obtain detailed…
Curatopia
Reimagining Oceania through Critical Junctures-Introduction
The introduction to this special issue draws attention to the conscious, creative and innovative actions of people when encountering new ideas, material objects or events like changes in the environment. The main argument is that critical situations and crisis make people reimagine their worlds, and how and when this is done is at the core of this volume. For this purpose, the concept of critical juncture is introduced since it allows for a fresh…
Globalizing Māori Museology
This article sets out toglobalize Māori museologythroughmana taonga, a concept that is historically grounded and articulated in contemporary museum practice. Mana taonga can be used to reconceptualize issues of engagement, knowledge, and virtuality by exploring ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross-cultural curatorsh…
Experiencing differences and negotiating prejudices at the Immigration Museum Melbourne
n\t\t\t\t\tThe social agency of museums in countering prejudices and fostering respect for differences is increasingly recognised and empirical research has begun to illuminate the impacts of exhibitions devoted to difficult subjects on audiences. This paper draws on an ongoing research project conducted by two Australian universities in collaboration with the Immigration Museum Melbourne aimed at understanding the role of the Identity: Yours, Mi…
Contact Zones, Third Spaces, and the Act of Interpretation
The conceptual understanding of museums as 'contact zones' has been widely appropriated in the museum literature and beyond. But the discussion lacks empirical insights into actual experiences: What does 'contact' mean for the person experiencing it? How is it lived, negotiated and contested? Drawing on a long-term narrative study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), this paper offers an empirical interroga…
Encountering the 'Other
The Immigration Museum Melbourne, Australia, launched the Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours exhibition in 2011. Aimed primarily at secondary school students, this long-term installation seeks to foster reflection on identity and belonging, as well as dialogue about racism, through an interactive, immersive museum experience. This paper describes a multi-method research project, which included narrative interviews, focus groups and video diaries with 47…
The Cosmohermeneutics of Migration Encounters at the Immigration Museum, Melbourne
Drawing on a narrative study of Australian visitors to the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, this article explores the hermeneutic complexities of migration encounters through the meaning-making processes of museum visitors. Throughout this process of interpretive negotiations, museum exhibitions and visitor biographies become intertwined through narratives of migration. The empirical evidence emphasizes that the humanization of migration through …
Cultural feelings and the making of meaning
Cultural feelings are an undertheorised area of the human experience which are recently gaining attention and which need to be understood in the context of museum visitor studies where they are largely ignored. Drawing on a long-term narrative study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), this paper unearths the conditions of meaning-making or hermeneutic foundations that facilitate the subsequent processes of…
Cultural feelings and the making of meaning
Cultural feelings are an undertheorised area of the human experience which are recently gaining attention and which need to be understood in the context of museum visitor studies where they are largely ignored. Drawing on a long-term narrative study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), this paper unearths the conditions of meaning-making or hermeneutic foundations that facilitate the subsequent processes of…
Contact Zones, Third Spaces, and the Act of Interpretation
The conceptual understanding of museums as 'contact zones' has been widely appropriated in the museum literature and beyond. But the discussion lacks empirical insights into actual experiences: What does 'contact' mean for the person experiencing it? How is it lived, negotiated and contested? Drawing on a long-term narrative study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), this paper offers an empirical interroga…
The experience of a museum space
Drawing on a long-term narrative study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), this paper illuminates the experience of a museum space. It sheds light on the interpretive interplay between museological space, content and narrative throughout the construction of meanings by museum visitors. I argue that these spatial dynamics emerge as a condition of meaning-making, or hermeneutic foundation, which facilitates …
Mana Taonga and the public sphere
Recent re-conceptualizations of the ‘public sphere’ facilitated a much needed shift in thinking about identity politics ‘from a substance ... to a movement’ (Weibel and Latour, 2007). This laid the foundation for dissolving the ‘emanatist vision’ (Bourdieu, 1990) of self-explanatory and perpetual systems and structures towards the interrogation of actions and performances that simultaneously constitute and are affected by such wider socio-politic…
Experiencing differences and negotiating prejudices at the Immigration Museum Melbourne
n\t\t\t\t\tThe social agency of museums in countering prejudices and fostering respect for differences is increasingly recognised and empirical research has begun to illuminate the impacts of exhibitions devoted to difficult subjects on audiences. This paper draws on an ongoing research project conducted by two Australian universities in collaboration with the Immigration Museum Melbourne aimed at understanding the role of the Identity: Yours, Mi…
Globalizing Māori Museology
This article sets out toglobalize Māori museologythroughmana taonga, a concept that is historically grounded and articulated in contemporary museum practice. Mana taonga can be used to reconceptualize issues of engagement, knowledge, and virtuality by exploring ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross-cultural curatorsh…
Encountering the 'Other
The Immigration Museum Melbourne, Australia, launched the Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours exhibition in 2011. Aimed primarily at secondary school students, this long-term installation seeks to foster reflection on identity and belonging, as well as dialogue about racism, through an interactive, immersive museum experience. This paper describes a multi-method research project, which included narrative interviews, focus groups and video diaries with 47…
Sensitive Heritage
This introduction lays out this special issue, which juxtaposes articles on approaches to provenance research, conducted at German museum and university institutions, with articles on past, present and future potentialities of restitutions to originating societies in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and Namibia. In doing so, the issue makes the argument that provenance research and processes of restitution, and their underlying ethical and sensiti…
Indigenous Sovereignties
This special issue interrogates Indigenous sovereignties across Oceania and beyond the state. Addressing the topic in the plural, involves thinking about multiple kinds of self-determination, governance practices, and institutional bodies placed beyond—within and outside, above and below—the state, as well as through scalar motions from the local to the global and temporal orientations from the past to the future. In this diversity of contexts, t…
Introduction Souverainetés autochtones
Ce numéro spécial interroge les souverainetés autochtones à travers l’Océanie et au-delà de l’État. Aborder ce sujet au pluriel implique de réfléchir à de multiples formes d’autodétermination, de pratiques de gouvernance et d’organes institutionnels placés au-delà – à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur, au-dessus et au-dessous de l’État, ainsi qu’à travers des mouvements scalaires allant du local au global et des orientations temporelles allant du pass…
Reimagining Oceania through Critical Junctures-Introduction
The introduction to this special issue draws attention to the conscious, creative and innovative actions of people when encountering new ideas, material objects or events like changes in the environment. The main argument is that critical situations and crisis make people reimagine their worlds, and how and when this is done is at the core of this volume. For this purpose, the concept of critical juncture is introduced since it allows for a fresh…
Museums in a Global World
The following conversation took place during the Critical Heritage Studies conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, on 6 June 2012. The initial idea and topic was suggested by Kylie Message, the session was chaired by Conal McCarthy, and the recording was transcribed by Jennifer Walklate and edited by Conal McCarthy and Jennifer Walklate
Exhibition Reviews
Steampunk (Bradford Industrial Museum, UK) Framing India: Paris-Delhi-Bombay . . . (Centre Pompidou, Paris) E Tū Ake: Māori Standing Strong/Māori: leurs trésors ont une âme (Te Papa, Wellington, and Musée du quai Branly, Paris) The New American Art Galleries, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond Scott's Last Expedition (Natural History Museum, London) Left-Wing Art, Right-Wing Art, Pure Art: New National Art (Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw) Focus…
Mana Taonga and the public sphere
Recent re-conceptualizations of the ‘public sphere’ facilitated a much needed shift in thinking about identity politics ‘from a substance ... to a movement’ (Weibel and Latour, 2007). This laid the foundation for dissolving the ‘emanatist vision’ (Bourdieu, 1990) of self-explanatory and perpetual systems and structures towards the interrogation of actions and performances that simultaneously constitute and are affected by such wider socio-politic…
The experience of a museum space
Drawing on a long-term narrative study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), this paper illuminates the experience of a museum space. It sheds light on the interpretive interplay between museological space, content and narrative throughout the construction of meanings by museum visitors. I argue that these spatial dynamics emerge as a condition of meaning-making, or hermeneutic foundation, which facilitates …
The Cosmohermeneutics of Migration Encounters at the Immigration Museum, Melbourne
Drawing on a narrative study of Australian visitors to the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, this article explores the hermeneutic complexities of migration encounters through the meaning-making processes of museum visitors. Throughout this process of interpretive negotiations, museum exhibitions and visitor biographies become intertwined through narratives of migration. The empirical evidence emphasizes that the humanization of migration through …
Cultural feelings and the making of meaning
Cultural feelings are an undertheorised area of the human experience which are recently gaining attention and which need to be understood in the context of museum visitor studies where they are largely ignored. Drawing on a long-term narrative study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), this paper unearths the conditions of meaning-making or hermeneutic foundations that facilitate the subsequent processes of…
Experiencing differences and negotiating prejudices at the Immigration Museum Melbourne
n\t\t\t\t\tThe social agency of museums in countering prejudices and fostering respect for differences is increasingly recognised and empirical research has begun to illuminate the impacts of exhibitions devoted to difficult subjects on audiences. This paper draws on an ongoing research project conducted by two Australian universities in collaboration with the Immigration Museum Melbourne aimed at understanding the role of the Identity: Yours, Mi…
Contact Zones, Third Spaces, and the Act of Interpretation
The conceptual understanding of museums as 'contact zones' has been widely appropriated in the museum literature and beyond. But the discussion lacks empirical insights into actual experiences: What does 'contact' mean for the person experiencing it? How is it lived, negotiated and contested? Drawing on a long-term narrative study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), this paper offers an empirical interroga…
Encountering the 'Other
The Immigration Museum Melbourne, Australia, launched the Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours exhibition in 2011. Aimed primarily at secondary school students, this long-term installation seeks to foster reflection on identity and belonging, as well as dialogue about racism, through an interactive, immersive museum experience. This paper describes a multi-method research project, which included narrative interviews, focus groups and video diaries with 47…
Globalizing Māori Museology
This article sets out toglobalize Māori museologythroughmana taonga, a concept that is historically grounded and articulated in contemporary museum practice. Mana taonga can be used to reconceptualize issues of engagement, knowledge, and virtuality by exploring ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross-cultural curatorsh…
Reimagining Oceania through Critical Junctures-Introduction
The introduction to this special issue draws attention to the conscious, creative and innovative actions of people when encountering new ideas, material objects or events like changes in the environment. The main argument is that critical situations and crisis make people reimagine their worlds, and how and when this is done is at the core of this volume. For this purpose, the concept of critical juncture is introduced since it allows for a fresh…
Curatopia
Curatopia
What is the future of curatorial practice? How can the relationships between Indigenous people in the Pacific, collections in Euro-American institutions, and curatorial knowledge in museums globally be (re)conceptualised in reciprocal and symmetrical ways? Is there an ideal model, a ‘curatopia,’ whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia, which can enable the reinvention of ethnographic museums and address their difficult colonial legacies? This…
Interpreting a Tatanua Mask
This article introduces the art historical method of functional deixis into the study of material culture in anthropology. Functional deixis begins with a thorough empirical description of communicative effects—visual and embodied—produced by a material thing on the beholder. It then proceeds by tending to a kind of formalisation that enables us, on the one hand, to sharpen our intuitive reaction to the thing and, on the other, to obtain detailed…
Materielle Verflechtungsgeschichte
Um es auf den Punkt zu bringen: HistorikerInnen lesen und schreiben. 1 Die Handwerkskunst dieser Profession zeichnet sich dadurch aus, basierend auf vornehmlich schriftlichen Quellen, Texte zu verfassen, die versuchen, sich an vergangene Zeiten anzunähern und den LeserInnen so Einblicke in andere Welten zu gewähren. Für viele HistorikerInnen bietet sogar ausschließlich das geschriebene Wort scheinbar genügend Beweislast, um solide Rückschlüsse au…
Refocusing Ethnographic Museums Through Oceanic Lenses
Conclusion
Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond
Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond provides a new look at the old anthropological concern with materiality and connectivity. It understands materiality not as defined property of some-thing, nor does it take connectivity as merely a relation between discrete entities. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it sees materiality and connectivity as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or more pre…
Sensitive Heritage
This introduction lays out this special issue, which juxtaposes articles on approaches to provenance research, conducted at German museum and university institutions, with articles on past, present and future potentialities of restitutions to originating societies in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and Namibia. In doing so, the issue makes the argument that provenance research and processes of restitution, and their underlying ethical and sensiti…
Museum – Archive – Infrastructure
Conal McCarthy, Philipp Schorch and Nicholas Thomas introduce two ongoing research initiatives and set out to conceptually explore the nexus of museum collections, archives and infrastructures
Re-membering Hawai'i
Material entities, mostly classified as “ethnographic objects” or “human remains”, held in German collections and museums still bear witness to the political, economic and scientific entanglements between Hawai‘i and Germany that emerged during the nineteenth century. Our article addresses the potential of (re)assembling and (re)activating these material and immaterial cultural connections – their re-membering – and argues for an understanding of…
What Can Museum Anthropology Do in the Twenty-first Century
This article sets out to tackle the question: 'what can museum anthropology do in the twenty-first century?' It does so by focusing on the doing in a double-sense: on what museum anthropology can do, as in affecting, impacting and achieving, as well as on museum anthropology's own doing, as a particular set of knowledge practices brimming with methodological, epistemological and ontological potentials to be harnessed for its own renewal and for c…
Introduction. Souverainetés autochtones
Indigenous Sovereignties
This special issue interrogates Indigenous sovereignties across Oceania and beyond the state. Addressing the topic in the plural, involves thinking about multiple kinds of self-determination, governance practices, and institutional bodies placed beyond—within and outside, above and below—the state, as well as through scalar motions from the local to the global and temporal orientations from the past to the future. In this diversity of contexts, t…
Introduction Souverainetés autochtones
Ce numéro spécial interroge les souverainetés autochtones à travers l’Océanie et au-delà de l’État. Aborder ce sujet au pluriel implique de réfléchir à de multiples formes d’autodétermination, de pratiques de gouvernance et d’organes institutionnels placés au-delà – à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur, au-dessus et au-dessous de l’État, ainsi qu’à travers des mouvements scalaires allant du local au global et des orientations temporelles allant du pass…
Sociology (19 works) · Art (15 works) · Museums and Cultural Heritage (15 works) · Anthropology (12 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · History (9 works) · Visual arts (9 works) · Archaeology (8 works)