In early November, more than 800 undergraduate students in the BIOLOGY 173 - Introductory Biology Laboratory class toured the four research museums at the Research Museums Center. The students toured the biology collections in the U-M Herbarium, the Museum of Zoology, and the Museum of Paleontology..
They also toured the UMMAA collections, where they learned about the history of UMMAA and the archaeological and ethnographic collections.
While the students viewed objects from the UMMAA collections, the collection managers and other staff and students discussed the fact that, although the collection contains objects from nature, the objects represent nature filtered through the complexity of culture. They also discussed how applying systematics to cultural material is reductive and strips aways knowledge, rather than enhancing it, and how not all cultures believe that knowledge should be open in the way that Western scientific tradition does.
As UMMAA seeks to work with descendants of the communities who made and used these collections, we have to learn that we don't have a right to all community knowledge and that we must learn to honor their traditions if we wish to effectively curate their belongings.
In the photo above, archaeology graduate student Arantxa Bertholet del Barrio talks to the undergraduate about various dolls in the UMMAA collection.
Read more about the tour on the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology website: https://lsa.umich.edu/eeb/news-events/all-news/search-news/class-visit-to-rmc.html
