A commentary on Paul Mullins's article “The Banality of Everyday Consumption,” this essay engages questions concerning domestic objects that might be collected in urban settings. It discusses challenges involved in documenting the complex meanings associated with such objects, what happens when objects are incorporated into museum collections and exhibitions, and how museum visitors interpret exhibitions in relation to their own expectations, assumptions, and narratives. [collecting, exhibitions, objects, narrative, visitor reception]

The calling of public scholarship is inherently multifaceted, and often inherently controversial; public scholars have to accommodate different spheres of society, different cultural values and goods, and even different political agendas in their work. Unlike academic workers, public scholars rarely have the opportunity to do work that is driven primarily by intellectual agendas, yet they also have to sustain fidelity to the ideas, values and standards of the disciplines they practice – even when sustaining fidelity means criticizing the most cherished tenets of the disciplines themselves. To be successful, public scholarship must be animated by a pluralist conception of society, a vision of the social world that recognizes that all of us live among different and incompatible cultures and that even the cultures we claim as our own have incommensurate and incompatible standards.

I have a friend who was trained as a social anthropologist. Now he is the chief curator of a major art museum, subject to periodic fits of status anxiety. During these moments he is given to lecturing me on the status of the museum as the home of and authentic objects. Another friend and colleague compulsively told me over and over again that People come to museums to see real objects, you know. Encountering metaphysical concerns over objects is a common enough experience among museum professionals. I want to argue in this paper that it is fueled by more than specialization and professional rivalries, by more than the friendly sniping between museums that emphasize objects and those that exhibit context and history.

Let me begin with a series of examples that illustrate the ways people are engaged in public scholarship, and the many forms it can take. Some deal specifically with museums, others with topics that different kinds of museums might try to exhibit. Taken together they suggest a wide range of issues that apply to museums, just as what museums do apply to other institutions of civil society.

The crisis in Area Studies is the subject of much recent debate.' But what this crisis is, how to define its causes, and where to situate solutions are more often assumed than considered. I want to suggest that the crisis has at least three facets. The first and most apparent manifestation of the crisis is economic: funders are increasingly reluctant to provide money for Area Studies endeavors-especially when the area in question appears to have little economic importance for the great powers, and Africa certainly fits that definition. Universities are increasingly reluctant to support Area Studies programs. University administrators seek to rationalize International and Area Studies by pursuing interdisciplinary ventures, such as Global Studies. In some university settings, departments have used the crisis in Area Studies to reassert their hold on graduate education by setting up barriers to students who should have courses on geography, culture, politics, and economy, and who should do some work in more than one discipline. The second facet of the crisis in Area Studies is simultaneously conceptual and psychological. I think of it as a crisis of self-confidence in which guiding assumptions about the definitions of the units of analysis, such as cultures and regions, are increasingly deemed to be wrong or irrelevant to social processes such as migration or cultural flows-which are perceived to be more important in some determining sense than the local and geographically restricted phenomena that are the conventional subjects of Area Studies. As a result, social and cultural phenomena that have been traditionally documented and analyzed by Area Studies specialists are considered to be irrelevant for understanding today's world. The third aspect of the current crisis is political: debates over the nature and future of Area Studies or the shape of Global Studies provide an arena for contesting values and definitions about what is significant to experience and examine and, by implication, what the academy should promote. I was recently asked to comment on a project for a major endowment to be raised under the rubric of global education. The donor is restricting its scope to Europe and Japan, on the grounds that the dynamic economies of these regions make their culture and society

American EthnologistVolume 21, Issue 4 p. 961-961 The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass. ROBERT J. GORDON IVAN KARP, IVAN KARP Smithsonian InstitutionSearch for more papers by this author IVAN KARP, IVAN KARP Smithsonian InstitutionSearch for more papers by this author First published: November 1994 https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1994.21.4.02a00750AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume21, Issue4November 1994Pages 961-961 RelatedInformation

Journal Article Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Ed. by Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. X, 614 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 1-56098-164-4. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 1-56098-189-X.) Get access Carolyn Hamilton Carolyn Hamilton University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 80, Issue 3, December 1993, Pages 1041–1042, https://doi.org/10.2307/2080423 Published: 01 December 1993

American AnthropologistVolume 95, Issue 4 p. 1043-1044 SOCIAL/CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987. V. Y. Mudimbe, ed Ivan Karp, Ivan Karp Emory UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Ivan Karp, Ivan Karp Emory UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: December 1993 https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1993.95.4.02a00520AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume95, Issue4December 1993Pages 1043-1044 RelatedInformation

Museum AnthropologyVolume 17, Issue 3 p. 32-42 Wonder and Worth: Disney Museums in World Showcase Assistant Professor Corinne A. Kratz, Assistant Professor Corinne A. Kratz Institute of African Studies, Emory University and Smithsonian InstitutionSearch for more papers by this authorProfessor Ivan Karp, Professor Ivan Karp Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Assistant Professor Corinne A. Kratz, Assistant Professor Corinne A. Kratz Institute of African Studies, Emory University and Smithsonian InstitutionSearch for more papers by this authorProfessor Ivan Karp, Professor Ivan Karp Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: October 1993 https://doi.org/10.1525/mua.1993.17.3.32Citations: 46AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume17, Issue3October 1993Pages 32-42 RelatedInformation