2016 Megaw lecture

Participant processes: Museums, collections and the creation of value

Presented by Distinguished Professor Howard Morphy

College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University

Lecture outline

Speaker bio

Thursday 16 June 2016

Flinders University
North Lecture Theatre 1
Humanities Building
Bedford Park

THIS EVENT HAS ENDED

Flinders University Museum of Art with the Department of Archaeology present:

Participant processes: Museums, collections and the creation of value

The objects in museum collections are signs and symptoms of history but they are also a rich resource for future dialogues and for changing understandings in the present. Consciously or unconsciously museums are engaged in value creation processes that influence attitudes to the objects they contain and to the people who produced them. The very act of collecting is an acknowledgement of value, but over time the value of objects changes. Museums and galleries have played a central role in this process of change in which the significance and very categorisation of their collections may be transformed.

In acknowledgement of the leading role Vincent Megaw has played in the academy’s dialogue with categories, in this lecture I will reflect on my own role in value creation processes.

Please contact the museum for materials and resources related to this lecture

Distinguished Professor Howard Morphy

College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University

Howard Morphy is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University. He is an anthropologist of art and visual anthropology with a major theoretical focus on the nature of cross-cultural categories. His most recent book is Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories (2007). With Frances Morphy he has worked closely with Yolngu people for over forty years. His involvement in e-research and in the development of museum exhibitions reflects his determination to make humanities research as accessible as possible to wider publics and to close the distance between the research process and research outcomes. He is currently working with colleagues at the British Museum and the National Museum of Australia on the concept of the relational museum, linking distributed collections to source communities.

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