Culture Matters: Learning from and Caring for Cultural Heritage

Assistant Curator of Ethnology, Dr. Claire Nicholas, and Ethnology Collections Manager Ella Crenshaw, use belongings in the museum’s collection to model the methods and perspectives of doing museum anthropology, including object-based and ethnographic research on material culture, and ways to reconstruct the missing stories or information about collections. Heritage is relevant not only for understanding the richness of past cultural practices and meanings, but also in animating communities and cultural expression in the present.