G Isaac
Biographic Data
| ID | 68688 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Isaac |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | Isaac |
| SIGNATURE | ISAAC G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Smithsonian Institution |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0424-7863 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 64 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Making kin is more than metaphor: Implications of responsibilities toward Indigenous knowledge and artistic traditions for museums
Many Indigenous communities do not regard objects as inanimate, but rather as animate kin. Based on our work as a collaborative group of museum coordinators and Hopi, Anishinaabe, and Penobscot artists, we explore narratives and kinship concepts emerging from working with collections of baskets and pottery. We question how recent theoretical conceptualizations of kinship have become overly rhetorical and, therefore, risk diminishing the tangible …
A laboratory habit of mind: Exhibit making and nineteenth century experimental anthropology at the United States National Museum
Being present and bearing witness: Talking About Cultural Revitalization Programming in Museums
At a time when museums are expected to address access issues that are the explicit and implicit products of their colonial histories, the Recovering Voices initiative at the Smithsonian Institution has focused on on-site and in-person community-led research. In particular, the Community Research Program (CRP) supports projects designed and implemented by Indigenous communities and according to their values and priorities. Through interviews with …
Anthropological face casts: Towards an ethical processing of their histories and difficult legacies of intimacy and ambiguity
Anthropologically informed plaster face casts were created and collected in the 19th and 20th centuries as part of an effort to develop human typologies, and to acquire data on what were perceived to be the morphological attributes of race. Their subsequent affective, politically sensitive, promiscuously mobile, and precarious qualities have resulted in them occupying highly charged territories within collections, as well as between museums and d…
Interruptions: Challenges and Innovations in Exhibition-Making
Anthropology and its institutions have come under increased pressure to focus critical attention on the way they produce, steward, and manage cultural knowledge. However, in spite of the discipline’s reflexive turn, many museums remain encumbered by Enlightenment-derived legitimating conventions. Although anthropological critiques and critical museology have not sufficiently disrupted the majority paradigm, certain exhibitionary projects have ser…
Anthropology, Museums and the Body: Lessons from an Experimental Teaching Environment
With increased interests in solving complex problems through interdisciplinary research-how best can museums engage with and benefit from such an approach? At the same time, how can we address critical questions, methods, and ethics surrounding the study of humans within museums? In order to engage with these questions, an interdisciplinary group of curators, artists and students worked together at the Smithsonian Institution to create an experim…
Borders and Interruptions
While museums are perceived as institutions dedicated to the dissemination and exchange of culturally diverse knowledges, museum scholarship has been hampered by a lack of multilingual networks and publications necessary for the exchange of museological perspectives between different linguistic, regional, and national communities. At the same time, the museum decolonization movement, the move from monocultural to pluricultural societies, the poli…
Anthropology, Museums and the Body: Lessons From an Experimental Teaching Environment
With increased interests in solving complex problems through interdisciplinary research-how best can museums use this approach to address critical social issues? In order to answer this question, an interdisciplinary group of curators, artists and students worked together at the Smithsonian Institution to create an experimental teaching environment to rethink the disciplinary boundaries around the study of the human body. Our aim was to use a ran…
Collecting
The anthropological study of collecting involves the use of anthropological frameworks to examine the methods and practices involved in the accumulation of objects. It encompasses the history of collecting and how this has shaped the discipline of anthropology, as well as the reinterpretation of collections as cultural, political, and ideological constructs. The conceptualization of collections as social constructs involves their reexamination ac…
Uncovering the demographics of collecting: A case-study of the US Exploring Expedition (1838–1842)
The US Exploring Expedition (1838–42) circumnavigated the globe to map uncharted territories and to collect natural and cultural specimens for future study. Due to the detailed documentation practices of the expedition’s leader, Charles Wilkes, the expedition records provide a rare insight into the collecting practices of the first nineteenth-century American voyage of discovery. Although the origins of anthropological collections are often trace…
Museums and the Practice of Anthropology: Whose Responsibility is it
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gwyneira Isaac; Museums and the Practice of Anthropology: Whose Responsibility is it?. Practicing Anthropology 1 July 2015; 37 (3): 19. doi: https://doi.org/10.17730/0888-4552-37.3.19 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manage…
Perclusive Alliances: Digital 3-D, Museums, and the Reconciling of Culturally Diverse Knowledges
Although social mechanisms for the control of knowledge are widely studied, research into how intersecting groups and institutions reconcile culturally different approaches to knowledge has been limited. I explore this territory by looking at a collaborative project to create digital 3-D scans and replicas of objects of cultural patrimony that was developed between the National Museum of Natural History and the Tlingit tribe of Alaska in 2010. Th…
Dying to Be Represented: Museums and Día de los Muertos Collaborations
Dying to Be Represented:Museums and Día de los Muertos Collaborations Gwyneira Isaac (bio), April Bojorquez (bio), and Catherine Nichols (bio) Some traditions—we think of them as the archive of our memories —Amelia Malagamba, 2009 Over the last four decades museums and cultural organizations in the United States have used their institutions to introduce Día de los Muertos celebrations to the general public.1 While these celebrations have become i…
Whose Idea Was This: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge
Zuni principles value repetition as an affirmation of the continuity of knowledge, thereby challenging particular Euro-American notions of the "copy" as a devaluation of the "original." Using examples from Zuni philosophy as well as scientific traditions in creating replicas, I examine overlaps and differences between Zuni and Euro-American approaches to the reproduction of knowledge. Contemporary Zuni concerns about controlling the reproduction …
Technology Becomes the Object: The Use of Electronic Media at the National Museum of the American Indian
The inaugural exhibits created for the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington DC were met with emotive public debates as to their success or failure to change the ways in which Native American cultures are portrayed in the USA. These debates, however, overlooked the significance of the use of electronic media in the NMAI galleries, their effect on the role of material culture and the subsequent shifts in how the collections w…
What Are Our Expectations Telling Us? Encounters with the NMAI
What Are Our Expectations Telling Us?Encounters with the NMAI Gwyneira Isaac (bio) I had two vastly dissimilar encounters with the inaugural exhibits at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington DC during its celebratory opening in September 2004. My first encounter was at the reception for museum staff, consultants, and their families, where I was accompanied by a group of anthropologists and museologists who were animated …
Mediating Knowledges: Zuni Negotiations for a Culturally Relevant Museum
Whose Idea Was This: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge
Zuni principles value repetition as an affirmation of the continuity of knowledge, thereby challenging particular Euro-American notions of the "copy" as a devaluation of the "original." Using examples from Zuni philosophy as well as scientific traditions in creating replicas, I examine overlaps and differences between Zuni and Euro-American approaches to the reproduction of knowledge. Contemporary Zuni concerns about controlling the reproduction …
Perclusive Alliances: Digital 3-D, Museums, and the Reconciling of Culturally Diverse Knowledges
Although social mechanisms for the control of knowledge are widely studied, research into how intersecting groups and institutions reconcile culturally different approaches to knowledge has been limited. I explore this territory by looking at a collaborative project to create digital 3-D scans and replicas of objects of cultural patrimony that was developed between the National Museum of Natural History and the Tlingit tribe of Alaska in 2010. Th…
Mediating Knowledges: Zuni Negotiations for a Culturally Relevant Museum
Making kin is more than metaphor: Implications of responsibilities toward Indigenous knowledge and artistic traditions for museums
Many Indigenous communities do not regard objects as inanimate, but rather as animate kin. Based on our work as a collaborative group of museum coordinators and Hopi, Anishinaabe, and Penobscot artists, we explore narratives and kinship concepts emerging from working with collections of baskets and pottery. We question how recent theoretical conceptualizations of kinship have become overly rhetorical and, therefore, risk diminishing the tangible …
Anthropological face casts: Towards an ethical processing of their histories and difficult legacies of intimacy and ambiguity
Anthropologically informed plaster face casts were created and collected in the 19th and 20th centuries as part of an effort to develop human typologies, and to acquire data on what were perceived to be the morphological attributes of race. Their subsequent affective, politically sensitive, promiscuously mobile, and precarious qualities have resulted in them occupying highly charged territories within collections, as well as between museums and d…
What Are Our Expectations Telling Us? Encounters with the NMAI
What Are Our Expectations Telling Us?Encounters with the NMAI Gwyneira Isaac (bio) I had two vastly dissimilar encounters with the inaugural exhibits at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington DC during its celebratory opening in September 2004. My first encounter was at the reception for museum staff, consultants, and their families, where I was accompanied by a group of anthropologists and museologists who were animated …
Being present and bearing witness: Talking About Cultural Revitalization Programming in Museums
At a time when museums are expected to address access issues that are the explicit and implicit products of their colonial histories, the Recovering Voices initiative at the Smithsonian Institution has focused on on-site and in-person community-led research. In particular, the Community Research Program (CRP) supports projects designed and implemented by Indigenous communities and according to their values and priorities. Through interviews with …
Technology Becomes the Object: The Use of Electronic Media at the National Museum of the American Indian
The inaugural exhibits created for the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington DC were met with emotive public debates as to their success or failure to change the ways in which Native American cultures are portrayed in the USA. These debates, however, overlooked the significance of the use of electronic media in the NMAI galleries, their effect on the role of material culture and the subsequent shifts in how the collections w…
Anthropology, Museums and the Body: Lessons From an Experimental Teaching Environment
With increased interests in solving complex problems through interdisciplinary research-how best can museums use this approach to address critical social issues? In order to answer this question, an interdisciplinary group of curators, artists and students worked together at the Smithsonian Institution to create an experimental teaching environment to rethink the disciplinary boundaries around the study of the human body. Our aim was to use a ran…
Dying to Be Represented: Museums and Día de los Muertos Collaborations
Dying to Be Represented:Museums and Día de los Muertos Collaborations Gwyneira Isaac (bio), April Bojorquez (bio), and Catherine Nichols (bio) Some traditions—we think of them as the archive of our memories —Amelia Malagamba, 2009 Over the last four decades museums and cultural organizations in the United States have used their institutions to introduce Día de los Muertos celebrations to the general public.1 While these celebrations have become i…
Mediating Knowledges: Zuni Negotiations for a Culturally Relevant Museum
What Are Our Expectations Telling Us? Encounters with the NMAI
What Are Our Expectations Telling Us?Encounters with the NMAI Gwyneira Isaac (bio) I had two vastly dissimilar encounters with the inaugural exhibits at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington DC during its celebratory opening in September 2004. My first encounter was at the reception for museum staff, consultants, and their families, where I was accompanied by a group of anthropologists and museologists who were animated …
Technology Becomes the Object: The Use of Electronic Media at the National Museum of the American Indian
The inaugural exhibits created for the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington DC were met with emotive public debates as to their success or failure to change the ways in which Native American cultures are portrayed in the USA. These debates, however, overlooked the significance of the use of electronic media in the NMAI galleries, their effect on the role of material culture and the subsequent shifts in how the collections w…
Whose Idea Was This: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge
Zuni principles value repetition as an affirmation of the continuity of knowledge, thereby challenging particular Euro-American notions of the "copy" as a devaluation of the "original." Using examples from Zuni philosophy as well as scientific traditions in creating replicas, I examine overlaps and differences between Zuni and Euro-American approaches to the reproduction of knowledge. Contemporary Zuni concerns about controlling the reproduction …
Dying to Be Represented: Museums and Día de los Muertos Collaborations
Dying to Be Represented:Museums and Día de los Muertos Collaborations Gwyneira Isaac (bio), April Bojorquez (bio), and Catherine Nichols (bio) Some traditions—we think of them as the archive of our memories —Amelia Malagamba, 2009 Over the last four decades museums and cultural organizations in the United States have used their institutions to introduce Día de los Muertos celebrations to the general public.1 While these celebrations have become i…
Museums and the Practice of Anthropology: Whose Responsibility is it
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gwyneira Isaac; Museums and the Practice of Anthropology: Whose Responsibility is it?. Practicing Anthropology 1 July 2015; 37 (3): 19. doi: https://doi.org/10.17730/0888-4552-37.3.19 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manage…
Perclusive Alliances: Digital 3-D, Museums, and the Reconciling of Culturally Diverse Knowledges
Although social mechanisms for the control of knowledge are widely studied, research into how intersecting groups and institutions reconcile culturally different approaches to knowledge has been limited. I explore this territory by looking at a collaborative project to create digital 3-D scans and replicas of objects of cultural patrimony that was developed between the National Museum of Natural History and the Tlingit tribe of Alaska in 2010. Th…
Uncovering the demographics of collecting: A case-study of the US Exploring Expedition (1838–1842)
The US Exploring Expedition (1838–42) circumnavigated the globe to map uncharted territories and to collect natural and cultural specimens for future study. Due to the detailed documentation practices of the expedition’s leader, Charles Wilkes, the expedition records provide a rare insight into the collecting practices of the first nineteenth-century American voyage of discovery. Although the origins of anthropological collections are often trace…
Collecting
The anthropological study of collecting involves the use of anthropological frameworks to examine the methods and practices involved in the accumulation of objects. It encompasses the history of collecting and how this has shaped the discipline of anthropology, as well as the reinterpretation of collections as cultural, political, and ideological constructs. The conceptualization of collections as social constructs involves their reexamination ac…
Borders and Interruptions
While museums are perceived as institutions dedicated to the dissemination and exchange of culturally diverse knowledges, museum scholarship has been hampered by a lack of multilingual networks and publications necessary for the exchange of museological perspectives between different linguistic, regional, and national communities. At the same time, the museum decolonization movement, the move from monocultural to pluricultural societies, the poli…
Anthropology, Museums and the Body: Lessons From an Experimental Teaching Environment
With increased interests in solving complex problems through interdisciplinary research-how best can museums use this approach to address critical social issues? In order to answer this question, an interdisciplinary group of curators, artists and students worked together at the Smithsonian Institution to create an experimental teaching environment to rethink the disciplinary boundaries around the study of the human body. Our aim was to use a ran…
Interruptions: Challenges and Innovations in Exhibition-Making
Anthropology and its institutions have come under increased pressure to focus critical attention on the way they produce, steward, and manage cultural knowledge. However, in spite of the discipline’s reflexive turn, many museums remain encumbered by Enlightenment-derived legitimating conventions. Although anthropological critiques and critical museology have not sufficiently disrupted the majority paradigm, certain exhibitionary projects have ser…
Anthropology, Museums and the Body: Lessons from an Experimental Teaching Environment
With increased interests in solving complex problems through interdisciplinary research-how best can museums engage with and benefit from such an approach? At the same time, how can we address critical questions, methods, and ethics surrounding the study of humans within museums? In order to engage with these questions, an interdisciplinary group of curators, artists and students worked together at the Smithsonian Institution to create an experim…
Being present and bearing witness: Talking About Cultural Revitalization Programming in Museums
At a time when museums are expected to address access issues that are the explicit and implicit products of their colonial histories, the Recovering Voices initiative at the Smithsonian Institution has focused on on-site and in-person community-led research. In particular, the Community Research Program (CRP) supports projects designed and implemented by Indigenous communities and according to their values and priorities. Through interviews with …
Anthropological face casts: Towards an ethical processing of their histories and difficult legacies of intimacy and ambiguity
Anthropologically informed plaster face casts were created and collected in the 19th and 20th centuries as part of an effort to develop human typologies, and to acquire data on what were perceived to be the morphological attributes of race. Their subsequent affective, politically sensitive, promiscuously mobile, and precarious qualities have resulted in them occupying highly charged territories within collections, as well as between museums and d…
A laboratory habit of mind: Exhibit making and nineteenth century experimental anthropology at the United States National Museum
Making kin is more than metaphor: Implications of responsibilities toward Indigenous knowledge and artistic traditions for museums
Many Indigenous communities do not regard objects as inanimate, but rather as animate kin. Based on our work as a collaborative group of museum coordinators and Hopi, Anishinaabe, and Penobscot artists, we explore narratives and kinship concepts emerging from working with collections of baskets and pottery. We question how recent theoretical conceptualizations of kinship have become overly rhetorical and, therefore, risk diminishing the tangible …
Sociology (15 works) · Museums and Cultural Heritage (12 works) · History (11 works) · Anthropology (10 works) · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation (10 works) · Art (8 works) · History (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Social science (7 works)