Caring for Change: Negotiating Care as a Process of Decolonization at the Field Museum.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In the last thirty years, museums have made significant strides to interrogate their colonial histories and revise their practices through decolonization processes largely focused on exhibitions and public interpretation. While exhibitions are important, collections are core to the museum's mission, and embody Native American social relations across generations. In many cases, Native American objects are not just objects; they are kin and require forms of care that respect Indigenous constructions of social relations. My approach to understanding institutional change focuses on the social processes of care in a museum setting, where the social worlds of human and other-than-human relationships impact, and are impacted by, practices of care. This ethnography of a collaborative exhibition project to renovate the Native North American Hall at the Field Museum examines how the social relations and responsibilities enacted through caring for cultural items influence museum policy, practice, and values. While the hall renovation focused on collaborative exhibition-making, my research, instead, focused on the practices and practitioners of care work in relation to those preparations, as a means to reveal how care is central to museological change. By following the collaborative exhibition process, I show how the ethos of collaboration extended beyond interpretation, and in turn, had significant impacts on institutional values and practices. These changes, which were debated and embodied during the collaborative exhibition-making process, came to transform museum practices and understandings of care. This dissertation contributes to conversations on decolonizing museums and the anthropology of care, while grappling with theoretical understandings about institutional change and decolonization that include, but also move beyond, culturally appropriate collections care, including practices that attend to other-than-human object beings and Indigenous constructions of kinship. I argue that museum collaborations with Native American stakeholders offer unique insights into decolonial museum transformations, by describing moments in which the politics of care are debated and performed by museum staff and external Native stakeholders. Care thus emerges as a political and transformative act, rooted in personal, community, and institutional relations, that takes place at the intersection of human and other-than-human relationships, both inside and outside of the museum.