Valene L. Smith Museum of Anthropology

Museum Engagement for a Sabbatical

By Dr. William Nitzky, Director of the Valene L. Smith Museum of Anthropology

The plan was to go to China this year. I was granted a year-long sabbatical for the 2021-2022 academic year after I reached my sixth year as a professor of Cultural Anthropology and Museum Studies in the Department of Anthropology. However, the pandemic changed things. China’s severe travel restrictions did not allow entry to me and prevented me from spending part of my sabbatical teaching at Shanghai University students and conducting research in my field sites in southwest China. But, as one door closes, another opens. My family and I moved to Japan, and relationships I established at a symposium I presented at in Osaka in 2017 gave way to an invitation as an Overseas Visiting Fellow at the National Museum of Ethnology, the largest ethnographic museum and social sciences research institute in Japan. Under a joint research project at Minpaku, I was asked to assist in building a new community-museum relationship with local residents of Japan.

Dr. Nitzky at the entry walkway towards one of the largest shrine complexes in Niigata prefecture

Much of my work in museums and museum studies has focused on community-museum relations. My work in China, over the past two decades, has centered on examining the creation and implications of community-based museums in ethnic minority areas. After coming to Chico State, I continued to advance the participatory approach in our practices at the Valene L. Smith Museum of Anthropology and worked with two North State minority community groups, Hmong Americans and Japanese Americans, to collaboratively develop two exhibitions, Hmong Reflections and Imprisoned at Home. As part of our curatorial team for these exhibitions, students learned the value and importance of working with source communities and that narratives and perspectives can be shifted when individuals’ personal stories take center stage. I wanted to draw on these rich experiences to offer something new to the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan.

We must think of the museum as human-centered. Museums are made of people and about people. Museums are us. What are the community resources, knowledge, and interests that can inform museum practices? ~ Mike Murawski

Dr. Nitzky examining a piece from the National Museum of Ethnology’s China collection for installment in the China gallery.

A World Heritage Site in Gifu prefecture.

These two statements have become a key focus of my work in Japan. The National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka holds the country’s largest collection of objects of cultures from around the world. A sizable aspect of the museum collection, approximately 20,000 objects, represent cultures of sub-Saharan Africa. The museum has already well established relations with diverse source communities through years of community relationship building and collaboration, for example with the Ainu minority community of northern Japan and source community groups through its new Info-Forum program, such as the Hopi of northern Arizona thanks to the remarkable work of Dr. Asunori Ito. With over 12,000 Africans residing in Japan, Dr. Taku Iida, faculty at the museum and specialist on Madagascar and heritage transmission, wanted to launch a new research agenda aimed at connecting the museum with this African diaspora. Dr. Iida asked me to help him lead this program.

While the project remains ongoing, we have made significant progress in only a few months of work. To start, I created a three phase approach to program development. First, I began by reviewing the most current literature on recent approaches and trends taken in museums on intercultural dialogue, community participation, and building collaboration. Importantly, the museum world has seen a growth in interest in migrant communities, especially in Europe, and literature has provided valuable practical insights into approaches museums have taken to serve and engage such communities. The review of literature contributed to forming our development strategies for building collaboration and a methodology for engagement. In addition, with a significant collection of objects from Sub-saharan Africa in the museum, I examined recent cases on re-examining collections from a migration and cultural diversity perspective to offer insight into how new perspectives on diversity and inclusion can enhance community-based collection engagement.

Dr. Nitzky and others

I was part of a Collaborative Project with People of African Descent in Kansai, Japan led by Dr. Taku Iida and myself.

An important part of this first phase of the project has been presenting these concepts and approaches to museum faculty and staff involved in the project. As a traditional ethnographic museum, some of these concepts have not been previously explored by the museum, and my role became more of a translator of this new museum work. Importantly, this is the time the program started to take some shape. I am aware of approaches taken by many museums throughout the world to engage source communities that focus on a particular museum-led agendas. Museums identify an objective, for example, to curate an exhibition on such and such a culture or topic and invite a cultural group(s) for consultation and possibly collaboration. Museums may want to create an interpretative component to their collections and consult with a cultural group(s) for them to interpret parts of the collection and the museum documents the process. These are indeed collaborative projects and can be mutually beneficial to the museum and the communities involved. However, oftentimes they are temporal and a one-and-done event. At the National Museum of Ethnology I wanted to rethink these practices and explore the sustainability of community-museum relationships. We decided not to create preconceived and fixed goals and objectives of the project involving people of African descent living in Japan. Rather, we centered on key principles - community interest and values, community-driven, and community-building. With these principles in mind, we aimed to allow the discussions and engagements with African diaspora partners to shape the project on their own terms.

Dr. Nitzky in the museum space, in the China gallery, with faculty colleagues from the museum.

For the second phase of the project, which we are currently working on right now, from January to mid-Spring 2022, we have been focused on establishing connections and forms of engagement with source community members to identify community interests, values, and prospective collaborators and partners. In anthropological terms, this was the start of our empirical fieldwork. We decided to take a three-pronged approach to finding people for the project. First, we drew on relationships the museum has had with African community members and scholars. (The museum has conducted previous exhibitions and workshops with African scholars and artists inside and outside Japan.) Second, we drew on data collection from online social media platforms to identify individuals and groups activity in Japan.

Dr. Nitzky (right)We found important information on new businesses (retail and restaurants), NPOs, education outlets, and group associations. Third, we conducted fieldwork in Osaka and the Kansai region to explore areas and neighborhoods where members of the African diaspora live and work. Fruitful results from our fieldwork led to Zoom meetings with some of our contacts and the identification of four key stakeholder partners. In the second phase of our project, we invited these stakeholders to the museum to introduce them to the work of the museum and its exhibitions and collections. Touring the galleries with them, we observed how moved they were by the exhibitions on African peoples and cultures and heritage on display. The gallery tour provoked stories, memories, and self-awareness for them. In our follow-up discussions, they stated that they wanted to create a new project with the museum on peoples of African descent living in Japan to share their memories of Africa through cultural heritage. I am happy to report that the president and executive directors of two of the largest associations in Japan for African people have agreed to partner with us and collaborate on developing this and other new projects to serve them and their constituents.

Our final phase of project development will begin later this year (2022), when partner projects are confirmed and a strategic plan for implementation and continuation into the future is made.

What this project and others in museums comes down to is asking ourselves, as museum professionals (current and future), are we ready to conduct an honest, thorough investigation of what it really means to carry out intercultural and collaborative work? Museums, now more than ever, must engage in facilitating communication for intercultural dialogue and must be ready and open for transformation (for the museum itself and said communities). We cannot merely state we support inclusion as practice. Rather we must transform the museum into a contact and dialogic space for multiple stakeholders to come together and interact. For the museum to serve, it must first welcome and learn. I am honored to be given the chance to work with incredible scholars and professionals at the National Museum of Ethnology and I hope my work in Japan creates new relationships and avenues for change and encourages the sharing and embrace of multiple viewpoints, interpretations, and stories.