ACADEMIC SEMESTER IN FLORENCE [list of courses]

Aleksandra Djajic Horvat
An Ethnography of Florentine Museums

This course aims to cast light on the history and the structure of museums that originated in Florence at the turn of the century, aiming to provide students with the useful instruments for reading, analysing, and understanding both history and structure of a museum.

Using anthropological theories and methodology as well as the tools of the history of science as a conceptual framework, this seminar will explore the organizational and ideological aspects of museum cultures.

The aim is to help students develop a critical understanding of the creation, function, histories, politics, and contemporary meanings of objects; the representation of cultures in museum displays and other public venues; the issues of representation; the cross-cultural circulation of objects in the global economy, notions of value and the loss of material form, objectification and consumption.

The course includes visits to museums in Florence and students are required to work on an individual project relating to a Florentine museum and to write an original research paper.

The course offers a structured semester of lectures.

* Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
* 1988. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
* Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford : Clarendon Press.
* Gosden, C. and Knowles, C. 2001. Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Colonial Change. Oxford : Berg.
* Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 1991. 'Objects of Ethnography', in Karp and Lavine, eds. Exhibiting Cultures . Washington and London: Smithsonian, pp. 386-443.

Aleksandra Djajic Horvat / Biography