Prophets and Ghosts

Regular price €43.99
A01=Samuel J. Redman
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
American Indians
Anthropology
Art
Author_Samuel J. Redman
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=GLZ
Category=GM
Category=HBJK
Category=HBTB
Category=JBSL11
Category=JFSL9
Category=JHMC
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Collecting
COP=United States
Cultural Revitalization
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
History
Language_English
Museum Studies
Museums
Native Americans
PA=Available
Painting
Photography
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
Salvage Anthropology
softlaunch

Product details

  • ISBN 9780674979574
  • Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
  • Publication Date: 26 Oct 2021
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock

10-20 Working Days
: On Backorder

Will Deliver When Available
: On Pre-Order or Reprinting

We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!

A searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to preserve the culture of “vanishing” Indigenous peoples through dispossession of the very communities it was meant to protect.

In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other chroniclers began amassing Indigenous cultural objects—crafts, clothing, images, song recordings—by the millions. Convinced that Indigenous peoples were doomed to disappear, collectors donated these objects to museums and universities that would preserve and exhibit them. Samuel Redman dives into the archive to understand what the collectors deemed the tradition of the “vanishing Indian” and what we can learn from the complex legacy of salvage anthropology.

The salvage catalog betrays a vision of Native cultures clouded by racist assumptions—a vision that had lasting consequences. The collecting practice became an engine of the American museum and significantly shaped public education and preservation, as well as popular ideas about Indigenous cultures. Prophets and Ghosts teases out the moral challenges inherent in the salvage project. Preservationists successfully maintained an important human inheritance, sometimes through collaboration with Indigenous people, but collectors’ methods also included outright theft. The resulting portrait of Indigenous culture reinforced the public’s confidence in the hierarchies of superiority and inferiority invented by “scientific” racism.

Today the same salvaged objects are sources of invaluable knowledge for researchers and museum visitors. But the question of what should be done with such collections is nonetheless urgent. Redman interviews Indigenous artists and curators, who offer fresh perspectives on the history and impact of cultural salvage, pointing to new ideas on how we might contend with a challenging inheritance.

Samuel J. Redman is the author of Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums, named a Nature Top 20 Book and a Smithsonian Top History Book. A specialist in American cultural and museum history, he is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has worked at the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Field Museum in Chicago.