Haidy Geismar [University College London]

Kooperation des ZIRS, des Instituts für Soziologie, der Juristischen und Wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Fakultät, Juristischer Bereich, und des Seminars für Ethnologie
Melanchthonianum, Hörsaal XX
Universitätsplatz 8/9
06108 Halle

Museums are preeminent sites for the production and dissemination of object lessons, the harnessing of the material world – the real – for didactic purposes. In this presentation, I explore some contemporary object lessons in twenty-first century museums. I ask what impressions and lessons about the “real” are developed within the intersections of old museum collections and new technologies and explore in particular what lessons, both intended and unintended, we are taught through these encounters between the digital and the analogue.

Dr. Haidy GEISMAR is a social anthropologist with research interests in intellectual and cultural property, indigenous rights, new forms of cultural representation, the anthropology of art, critical museology and the South Pacific (especially Vanuatu and New Zealand). Since 2000 she has been working with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, since 2004 also in Aotearoa New Zealand, collaborating with curators to investigate alternative models of value for Maori cultural production. She is reader in digital anthropology and material culture at the University College London.