Urban Development and Fishing Livelihoods in the Museum: Nostalgia and Discontent in Central Vietnam

This article explores how the topics of fishing and urban development are addressed in a Vietnamese social history museum. Drawing on a project taking place in the Museum of Danang, it describes the way the museum represented the voices of a displaced fishing community who were moved from traditional fishing huts on the riverside to a social housing complex as part of Danang’s urban development plan in the 2000s. Capturing the impact of the community’s relocation on their fishing livelihoods through an exhibition of objects, photographs and texts, the article reveals ways in which nostalgia is recruited to make social, political and moral commentary on urban equality and livelihood change in a rapidly developing city. Methodologically, the project explored the limits of critical representation in an authoritarian state and how nostalgia can be understood as a subtle call for ethical action

Thirty years of Doi Moi in the museum:Changing representations of development in late-socialist Vietnam

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe an exhibition that celebrated 30 years of reform in the Vietnamese National Museum of History, which opened in 2016. It contributes to anthropological understandings of the way exhibitions create new forms of cultural heritage, and so operate as a kind of technology of governance for legitimising state transformations that seek to celebrate neoliberal ideologies and the rise of the individual. Design/methodology/approach: Using an ethnographic methodology, it explores some of the behind-the-scenes decisions involved in producing a narrative of national development since the Doi Moi reforms of 1986. Findings: In analysing how imported memory approaches were innovatively employed alongside conventional historical facts, this paper reveals ways in which old revolutionary narratives make way for expansive and more acceptable concepts of development that embrace well-being and quality of life as well as national achievements. Originality/value: This research is based on original ethnographic research conducted by the author and contributes to an emerging field of museum and heritage studies in East and South-East Asia

Empathie avec la matière

Empathie avec la matière  : comment repenser la nature de l’action technique.L’importance des matériaux est souvent minimisée dans l’analyse des systèmes sociaux et techniques alors qu’ils façonnent les bases mêmes du monde dans lequel nous vivons. Cet article se propose de questionner cette omission en attirant l’attention sur la nature des matériaux et des actions calculées qu’ils occasionnent. Nous soutenons que le potentiel transformatif des matériaux joue un rôle essentiel quant à leur choix et leur utilisation, lequel potentiel va de pair avec une certaine empathie, une «  intersubjectivité  », dont la nature est déterminante pour comprendre comment les individus interprètent leur monde social de manière abstraite, généralisable et souvent immuable. Nous examinons la nature de l’empathie avec les matériaux à travers une série d’études de cas ramenés du Pacifique, où le rôle du concret dans l’imagination sociale occupe une place importante dans les études ethnographiques, contrairement aux collections d’artefacts qui, curieusement, demeurent en marge, un simple témoignage de la description du monde social.Empathy with the matter  : how to reconsider the nature of the technical action. Materials are often downplayed in the analysis of social and technical systems and yet materials shape the very basis of the world we live in. This paper sets out to challenge this oversight by drawing attention to the nature of materials and the acts of calculation they engender. The transformative potential of materials, we argue, plays a fundamental role in their selection and uptake and is met with an empathy that is shared intersubjectively, the nature of empathy with materials being crucial for explaining how individuals interpret their social world in abstract, generalizable and often unchanging ways. We examine the nature of empathy with materials through a series of case studies taken from the Pacific, where the role of the concrete in social imagination has figured prominently in ethnographic studies, yet where artefact collections have curiously remained bystanders to the depiction of social worlds

E-CURATOR: 3D COLOUR SCANS FOR OBJECT ASSESSMENT E-curator project team

This paper presents an overview about the E-curator project focussing specifically on the integration of user needs through the participatory user interface design process

Fashioning belief: The case of the Baha'i Faith in Northern New Ireland

This paper focuses on the emergence of the Baha'i faith in the Nalik‐speaking area of northern New Ireland in the 1950s. I show how conversion to the Baha'i faith instated a new political and religious mode of being in the community, which encouraged individuals to take responsibility for their own spiritual development, their economic welfare and the care of their souls. In declaring themselves followers of the Baha'i faith, they fashioned themselves as possessive individuals by presenting themselves to others in the image of those who possessed belief and culture. By encompassing both traditional Nalik and orthodox Baha'i religious ideas, Baha'is in effect considered themselves modern Naliks, entering a worldwide community that offered rewards and resources not available to their Christian counterparts. This paper demonstrates how the process of self‐fashioning took the form of transformations of personhood and property in line with the ideology of possessive individualism. Naliks imagined that their religious conversion showed that converts were proprietors of themselves, privileged to a new political life by virtue of their access to new sources of power via the Baha'i faith