museum anthropology
anthropological archaeology, museum anthropology,
decolonizing collections-based
learning:
Experiential Observation as an
Interdisciplinary Framework for Object
Study
Christina J. Hodge
stanford university
abstract
This paper introduces a structured interdisciplinary frame-
work for collections-based learning. The scaffolding com-
bines visual analysis and multisensory material properties
analysis with anthropological understandings of culture,
context, and materiality. It is proposed in critical response
both to visual approaches of art history/critique and to
new materialist approaches that elevate the physical prop-
erties of matter. Both visual and materialist approaches
tend toward presentism and decontextualization. They
intrinsically privilege the viewer’s standpoint and interpre-
tations over those of makers, users, and descendant com-
munity members, producing a “colonizing” effect. This
outcome does not serve anthropology’s decolonizing
intentions of cultural relativism and context—or the
“twenty-first-century skills” with which anthropology
aligns. An anthropological understanding of material cul-
ture can enhance visual and material approaches by cultur-
ally contextualizing the multisensory experience of things
and teaching cultural relativism. This paper proposes such
an approach: semistructured experiential observation that
unites aspects of formal art historical analysis, multisen-
sory observation, and reflexive, polysemous cultural inter-
pretation. The framework offers an interdisciplinary,
decolonizing method of object study. [anthropology, mate-
riality, object-based learning, pedagogy, visuality]
Introduction: The Materialogical
Imagination as a Twenty-First-Century Skill
Twenty years ago, Margaret Conkey and Ruth Tring-
ham (1996, 246) presciently envisioned archaeologi-
cal teaching not as the transmission of historical facts
but “the liberation of the archaeological imagination”
to convey critical thinking, an orientation to deep
time, and an appreciation of material culture. This
perspective still resonates across disciplines as an
acute preoccupation with collected things linking
Museum Anthropology, Vol. 41, Iss. 2, pp. 142–58 © 2018 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/muan.12180
art history, and other modes of object-based knowl-
edge production. In teaching with cultural collec-
tions, I strive to impart to students not only an
“archaeological imagination,” but also a more
broadly conceived materialogical imagination.
“Material literacy” is the ability to approach material
culture as a generative source for meaning making.
The “materialogical imagination” is a material liter-
acy that is simultaneously critical and creative. Many
anthropologists recognize that “the teaching of
anthropology is enhanced when it embraces sensorial
engagement with materiality” (co-generative human/
thing relationships; Adams 2015, 89). The sentiment
should extend to collections-based teaching across
disciplines and collection types. Material literacy is as
crucial for collections-based learning as the visual lit-
eracy that has long inspired art history curricula. This
paper proposes a methodology for object study origi-
nating from this perspective.
Unfortunately, both visual and materialist
approaches have drawbacks. Visual and material-
properties-based approaches tend to privilege the
viewer’s standpoint over those of makers, users, and
descendant community members, exacerbating
museums’ already problematic asymmetries in power
(e.g., Harrison 2013; Lonetree 2012; Smith 2012). A
potential “colonizing” effect on knowledge produc-
tion—which perpetuates colonial/imperial subjuga-
tion by rendering certain populations and their
things objects of, rather than agents of, meaning-
making—is especially concerning. In contrast, “de-
colonization” (sensu Smith 2012) works to rebalance
historic power structures in a more equitable way,
one that supports indigenous self-determination,
social justice, and empowerment. For example, decol-
onizing methodologies explicitly expose and criticize
the colonial/imperial nature of Western academic
knowledge production. Student practitioners lack
experience in decolonizing methodologies, making
them vulnerable to perpetuating colonialist interpre-
tations. Thus, visual and materialist frames do not
inherently serve anthropology’s decolonizing inten-
tions of cultural relativism and context (summarized
for example in Bean 2000)—or the analogous
“twenty-first-century skills” of reflexivity and cultural
relativism with which anthropology aligns. This
paper addresses these deficiencies through a new,

interdisciplinary framework for material culture
study.
Although developed within a museum anthropol-
ogy collection, the proposed framework is applicable
to other types of collections where desired learning
outcomes include cultural competency (awareness of
the impact of cultural experience, standpoint, and
bias on interpretation and intercultural relationships)
and material literacy. The proposed experiential
observation model integrates aspects of formal art
historical analysis, haptic multisensory observation,
and reflexive, polysemous interpretation. It enhances
visual and material approaches by culturally contex-
tualizing the multisensory analysis of things.
Echoing commonly recognized twenty-first-cen-
tury skills in a globalizing world (Association of
American Colleges and Universities 2007) and con-
sidering the relevance of anthropology to those skills
(Adams 2015; Bender and Smith 2000; Kamp 2014),
this pedagogy imparts:
• Cultural competency (via multiplicity of mean-
ing in past and present),
• Critical thinking (via evaluation of multiple
forms of evidence and connections to present
social issues),
• Communication and collaboration (via consid-
eration and dissemination of multiple stand-
points in and outside the classroom), and
• The application of theory to practice.
Reflexivity is at the heart of these attributes and is
a central tenet of contemporary anthropological stew-
ardship. Further, these competencies facilitate what
Christina Kreps (2015) calls “socially engaged learn-
ing opportunities.” These, in turn, are a recognized
strength of contemporary anthropological practice
(Ducady et al. 2016; Herzfeld 2018; Kreps 2015).
As educators, stewards in university museums,
libraries, archives, and other special collections are
responsible for developing students’ analytical and
communication skills. This work necessarily includes
holistic engagement with three-dimensional material
culture collections—not just reading texts and seeing
works of art and design.
To meet the challenge of material literacy, educa-
tors must address students’ general unfamiliarity with
critical approaches to material culture as a primary
scholarly source. The taken-for-granted nature of
decolonizing collections-based learning
material culture is, of course, why things are such
powerful actors in social reproduction (Appadurai
1986; Bourdieu 1977; de Certeau 1984; Foucault
1995; Gell 1998; Latour 1993; Miller, ed. 2005; Tilley
et al. 2006). But this fact is simultaneously an impedi-
ment to “unpacking” the social roles of objects. Stu-
dents enter universities trained to analyze discourses
in text and visual media but are less experienced ana-
lyzing tangible things. They likely have looked at fine
art and artifacts in museums, internalizing a hands-
off and passive type of collections-based learning in
which “most museum objects are used as props and
exhibited to illustrate stories narrated by the exhibit
text” (Bartlett 2012, 201). Therefore, despite material
culture’s ubiquity, most students have little to no
experience working with artifacts as primary sources.
Those new to artifact study need training to inter-
pret material culture critically for themselves (e.g.,
Cain 2010; Causey 2015; Chatterjee and Hannan
2015; Duhs 2010; Gerritsen and Riello 2015). Cultural
collections can present the added challenge of unfa-
miliar objects. Things from other peoples, places, and
times have an “othering” effect. Testing this concept
by asking art students to fabricate archaeological
reproductions, Dorothy Washburn (2001, 67) discov-
ered that “the most important factors leading to accu-
rate reproductions are length of exposure,
meaningful associations, and especially cultural
knowledge.” Recognizing the bounds of one’s own
cultural knowledge is salutary. Sensitive instruction is
needed to bridge these divides.
The visual mode dominates in museums generally
and defines art institutions (Alpers 1991; Jandl and
Gold 2012)—and art institutions dominate the uni-
versity museum landscape (constituting more than
75% of the Association of Academic Museums and
Galleries membership in 2016). Therefore, visual lit-
eracy overwhelmingly influences student preparation
for collections-based thinking. Because most univer-
sity museums are art museums, art history and its pri-
orities also greatly influence discussions of museum-
based pedagogies in higher education (aside from
those in discipline-specific journals such as Museum
Anthropology). This paper argues for the importance
of material literacy and offers a scaffold for its instruc-
tion in university settings.
To this end, I first contextualize the proposed
methodology by comparing and contrasting
143
decolonizing collections-based learning
disciplinary inclinations toward object study in art
and anthropology. Case studies then clarify both the
strengths and weaknesses of visual and multisensory
material properties analysis. In critical response, a
structured process of Experiential Observation +
Synesthetic Analysis + Polysemous Interpretation
(ESP) is proposed and illustrated. This interdisci-
plinary way of knowing is object-centered and
attuned to visual representation. Yet, by integrating
anthropological understandings of culture, meaning,
and materiality, it remains grounded in concerns of
standpoint, cultural relativism, context, and the polit-
ical consequences of knowledge production. It there-
fore transmits analogous twenty-first-century skills of
cultural competency, social awareness, communica-
tion, collaboration, and application of theory to prac-
tice. These concepts are key to students’ success and
key components of a decolonized interpretive prac-
tice (Smith 2012).
In Theory: Object Orientations in Art and
Anthropology
Disciplinary Definitions
Object study is a core contribution of university
museums, no matter what discipline they represent
—but discipline does matter. In this paper, “an-
thropology” refers to study of social structures,
identities, social relations, and human-related mate-
rial culture. It includes the “ethnographic” and the
“archaeological.” “Art history” or “Art” refers to
the historical and systematic study of objects under-
stood as the products of certain expressive, creative
acts (sculpture, painting, drawing, etc.). Methodolo-
gies of art and anthropology, while resonant,
emerge from distinct disciplinary histories and
present-day missions. I am inspired by art-based
pedagogies and recognize their validity and pioneer-
ing contributions. But I also find that certain
methodologies successful in art institutions are not
well suited to anthropological museums because of
visual bias and disciplinary focus on aesthetic evalu-
ation rather than contextual interpretation.
There are significant rapprochements happening
between art and anthropology (e.g., discussed in Gell
1998; Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010). But deep
divisions remain. Despite decades of inter-, trans-,
and cross-disciplinary work, however, we have yet to
144
inhabit a post-disciplinary world. Disciplinary
distinctions are materialized through university col-
lections as sites of knowledge production. These dif-
ferences, therefore, inform collections-based
pedagogies.
Art
Art history is defined by its acceptance of “the pri-
macy of art in relation to other discursive practices”
and concern with the “sensuous and semiotic pecu-
liarity of the visual” (Dikovitskaya 2005, 49). That is,
art history advances visual modes of being and know-
ing over nonvisual means—including the means of
other disciplines, such as anthropology, that center
“human subjectivity and contextual meaning”
(Dikovitskaya 2005, 48).
Because art history’s core methodology is visual
analysis, it entrenches a hierarchy of senses crowned
by the curatorial gaze. This privileged perception
manifests through judgment of an item’s formal qual-
ities (of color, shape, line, mass, space, etc.), aesthetic
qualities, and symbolic and narrative representations.
The viewer also typically evaluates the maker’s skill
and creative process. The development of material
culture expertise in order to understand the age, ori-
gins, and use history of collections remains an essen-
tial part of collections-based scholarship. But, in art
history, it also tends to produce an exclusionary cate-
gory of “fine art” in which some things, but not all,
earn a place.
At its extreme, such an approach risks creating an
echo chamber of self-referential connoisseurship that
detaches objects from their cultural and political con-
texts. Connoisseurship emerged during the Enlight-
enment as a way of evaluating Western art and
antiquities (Morphy 2010, 268–69). Its historic role
as a technology of global colonialism/imperialism is
well documented (Bhattacharya 2006; Frank 2011;
Mithlo 2012), further complicating its deployment as
a decolonizing methodology—a capacity that (I
believe) material literacy must now offer. Without
multiple perspectives from multiple standpoints and
senses, visual judgments can become an end unto
themselves, rather than a means to understanding the
social roles of a collected thing.
Another problematic tendency in Western schol-
arly traditions, including museum traditions, is visu-
ality’s persistent “predisposition to dematerialize the

image” (Pinney 2006, 137). In other words, visual
analysis tends to treat its subject as a “circulating
sign” that illustrates meaning rather than a physical
thing in and of itself. While the sensory qualities of
objects are highlighted in galleries through design
techniques, items are simultaneously removed from
the spectator-viewer via physical distancing.
Phenomenologies of the gallery setting can be used to
advantage—designing observational exercises from
different viewing distances, for example (Alvord and
Friedlaender 2012, 154)—but this experience rein-
forces the role of sight. It has the paradoxical impact
of lending museum pieces an “immateriality” by priv-
ileging visuality over materiality in meaning making
(Petrov 2011).
Study classrooms bring students and collections
into closer contact. But, even in overtly experiential
pedagogies, the visual mode stubbornly prevails (e.g.,
discussed in Barnes and Lynch 2012; Burnham and
Kai-Kee 2011). For example, the Peabody Museum of
Archaeology and Ethnology’s object study guide is
titled A Guide to Looking and presents vision as the
foundation of interpretation (Department of Aca-
demic Partnerships 2016). Hands-off study is easier
and safer for objects than hands on. But this guide is a
missed opportunity to articulate material literacy, as
distinct from visual literacy, to students (though it
includes excellent prompts for cultural relativism).
Object handling is even construed by some as “an
active form of looking” (Coltman 2015, 24). I contest
this characterization as, at best, misplacing the multi-
sensory point of experiential learning and, at worst,
perpetuating a Western hierarchy of senses that val-
orizes vision (specifically, the curatorial gaze). The
predisposition toward the visual, which might be
termed “speculocentrism,” is at odds with current
developments in object-based learning, an increas-
ingly influential mode of inquiry-driven experiential
learning (Barlow 2016; Chatterjee 2011; Chatterjee
and Hannan 2015; Krmpotich 2015). These
approaches center multisensory experience of mate-
rial culture (e.g., reviewed in Fowles 2016; Hannan
et al. 2013; Kreps 2015; Tilley et al. 2006), as well as
cognitive research demonstrating the power of haptic,
multisensory learning (Tiballi 2015, 57).
Jeffrey Feldman (2006, 245) warns of a resulting
“lost body problem,” in which multisensory percep-
tion is “lost by a museum paradigm that emphasizes
decolonizing collections-based learning
visual display [and analysis] over other embodied
experiences,” leading to acute “political and historical
distortions.” The excellent, yet speculocentric, vol-
ume Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as
Experience typifies this outcome (Burnham and Kai-
Kee 2011). In their work at the J. Paul Getty Museum,
Rika Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee (2011, 59) “allow
visitors to construct their own meanings” via partici-
patory questions, dialogue, and discussion. The
docent/instructor avoids explicating meanings for
viewers. Through their own ideas, viewers are further
captivated by the study object. The experience of
visual interpretation thus becomes “marked off from
ordinary experience by a sense of wholeness and
unity, and characterized at close by feelings of enjoy-
ment and fulfillment” (Burnham and Kai-Kee 2011,
9). Burnham and Kai-Kee’s pedagogy illustrates how
museum objects exercise “affective weight,” a charis-
matic pull or “enchantment” that “engage[s] the
senses” and influences human practices in museum
spaces and beyond (Harrison 2013, 5).
The meaning ascribed to that enchantment
depends on a viewer’s habituated understanding and
personal experiences—their standpoint. Indigenous/
descendent perspectives are commonly missing from
museum spaces and records, which also often over-
look objects’ past and present “political weight”
(Harrison 2013, 5). This absence creates a vacuum
into which inappropriate and colonizing interpreta-
tions can flow (Krmpotich and Somerville 2016).
Experience with stakeholder communities proves that
the imposition of meaning onto cultural items by
uninformed viewers is not universally appropriate
and can, in fact, be a colonizing act (Harrison et al.
2013; Smith 2012; Sullivan and Edwards 2004). An
anthropological sensibility suggests that hidden tran-
scripts of power are present in all museum objects
(art or otherwise). Sometimes—perhaps all the time
—these transcripts should be introduced to unin-
formed students. Too often, in art-based visual analy-
sis exercises such as Burnham and Kai-Kee’s, they are
not.
Finally, art history has been critiqued for its
ambivalence toward material culture approaches
(Coltman 2015; Dikovitskaya 2005). Some doubt that
art historians can reconcile “the exclusive tempera-
ment of history of art” with the “inclusive nature of
material culture studies”; “even books [of art history
145
decolonizing collections-based learning
and critique] with material culture in the title rarely
articulate their precise terminology” (Coltman 2015,
24, emphasis original). I make no judgment on this
issue here. But I do note that the literature on art-
based teaching rarely addresses current thinking on
materialism or materiality (in contrast to sources on
archaeological and anthropological teaching).
Anthropology and Material Culture
Anthropology began as a collecting discipline, remov-
ing tangible things (and ancestral human remains)
from their cultural contexts and imposing new
schemes of value/meaning upon them (Ames 1992;
Cruikshank 1992; Edwards et al. 2006). In the early
twentieth century, the field corrected course, moving
away from the material and toward the ideological
and contextual. Scholars realized that, at the time,
collections were “a material manifestation of colonial
encounters from which many anthropologists”
sought to distance themselves (Cruikshank 1992, 5).
Given this history, Crispin Paine (2013) describes
anthropology’s recent return to object-centered
material cultural studies as a “revolution.” This move
is bolstered by both a “[multi] sensory turn” and an
ethnographic bridge growing between art practice
and anthropology (Kreps 2015, 97). A postmodern
commitment to critical reflexivity and cultural rele-
vance supports these connections. In contrast to art’s
traditional visuality, current anthropological under-
standings of materiality foreground the multisensory
experience of objects as contextual, situated, polyse-
mous, and subjective (Dobkins 2003; Kreps 2015).
Guided by these tenets, anthropology museums today
are acutely concerned with “deconstruct[ing] racial
and imperialist museum histories, thereby decoloniz-
ing themselves” (Bean 2000, 3).
Art and anthropology maintain distinct relation-
ships to—to adapt Stephen Greenblatt’s (1991) terms
—“resonance” and “wonder.” Anthropology collec-
tions include what might be called “masterpieces,”
but in aggregate they are dominated by the everyday.
Quotidian artifacts have been transformed into icons
through processes of archaeological and ethnographic
collection. They can become fetishized or aestheti-
cized (Loren 2015). The rationale of collecting never-
theless remains tied to anthropology’s disciplinary
projects and, therefore, distinct from that in an art
historical or gallery context. In university pedagogy,
146
this orientation to the everyday lowers barriers to
handling ethnographic, archaeological, or even deco-
rative art collections compared with pieces in fine art
collections (Adamson 2015; Ulrich et al. 2015; Vitelli
2015). Experiences of object handling are mediated
by gloves, training, and supervision, but they neces-
sarily create a more integrative use of senses than
looking.
Synesthetic (integrative and multisensory) engage-
ment can be emphasized further through instruc-
tional techniques. Even mundane objects embody
significant interpretive content and ambiguity, if one
prompts students to consider anthropological areas
of inquiry such as human–environment interactions,
use life, regimes of value, gifting and circulation,
communities of practice, and subjective personhood.
Concerns with the social construction of power and
legacies of colonialism add significance. In contrast,
art teaching tends to privilege illustrative works that
are narratively rich or symbolically dense (Alvord and
Friedlaender 2012; Burnham and Kai-Kee 2011).
Models built on masterpieces are not always trans-
ferrable to quotidian cultural heritage.
In archaeological and anthropological scholarship,
materiality studies are concerned with human/non-
human relationships perceived through the physical
properties of things, their material affordances (possi-
bilities for action, impact, and use), and their resul-
tant capacity to influence, and be influenced by,
people (Miller 2005). New materialism is expressed
through the processual relationships of matter (“the
stuff that things are made of”) that emerge alongside,
yet independent of, human relationships (Ingold
2007). Both materiality and materialism are part of a
broader move away from a Cartesian concern with
knowing (privileging mind) to an anti-Cartesian con-
cern with being in the world (privileging embodied
action; Knappett 2005; Stahl 2010, 154). Together,
these concepts distinguish the material turn and
are core competencies of any program in material
literacy.
In contrast to visual approaches, which are preoc-
cupied with form and representation, such material
approaches are preoccupied with tangible matter and
its place in human/non-human relationships. This
attention is crucial. As Adams (2015, 89) reminds us,
“the recent ‘material turn’ in anthropology has shown
that classrooms and exhibition spaces must engage

more rigorously and inventively with the fact that
humans interact via material things.” Yet, new mate-
rialism threatens to “[reintroduce] the binarism
between materiality [more specifically, matter] and
culture that much work in science studies [and the
social sciences] has helped to challenge. Matter
becomes a fetish object” (Ahmed 2008, 35). Fetishiz-
ing the cultural products of others is a foundation of
Western colonialism and has been since at least the
Renaissance (Alexander 2008; Hooper-Greenhill
1992). In imaginatively exploring their own multisen-
sory experiences of an object during a handling
session, students risk eliding its cultural meanings,
the political circumstances of its creation and con-
temporary roles, or the situated nature of their own
observations.
An Interdisciplinary Proposal
I propose a qualitatively different relationship
between students and things. Experiential observa-
tion both draws on, and addresses limitations of, for-
mal analysis, deep looking, and sensual/material
properties analysis. It operationalizes social theories
of embodiment, phenomenology, ontological sym-
metry (between things and persons), and materiality.
These approaches frame the senses as crucial to mate-
rial culture’s role in the coproduction of knowledge/
understanding/being. Yet experiential observation
alone is not enough to impact cultural competency.
Additional steps of synesthetic analysis and polyse-
mous interpretation situate experienced observations
within a robust contextual framework. As students
move from multisensory observations to synesthetic
analysis to polysemous interpretation, they develop
core competencies including critical and cross-disci-
plinary thinking, creativity, and cultural reflexivity.
The following section of case studies mirrors the
“Goldilocks approach” I used to develop a satisfac-
tory method for object study. I first describe two
inspirational methodologies: one prioritizing visual
perception; the other, physical. I discuss positive and
negative aspects of each, evaluated from my predispo-
sition to anthropologically informed instruction.
Finally, I introduce the augmented experiential obser-
vational teaching model I workshopped in my own
museum anthropology classes. This methodology
integrates valuable elements of both material and
visual methodologies. Its core goals are to impart
decolonizing collections-based learning
cultural competency and material literacy among
other twenty-first-century skills.
In Practice: Disciplinary Case Studies in
Object-Based Learning
Visual: Formal Analysis/“Deep Looking”
“Careful looking that prompts description is the art
historian’s preliminary mode of engagement” and,
therefore, the primary focus of art museum instruc-
tion (Coltman 2015, 19). Formal analysis is a founda-
tional approach to perception that generates a
structured, systematic visual analysis of forms used by
an artist in a work of art (Burnham 2007). Analytical
components are progressive, beginning with line,
shape, form, space, color, and texture. The Getty
Museum (2011) defines these elements as “compo-
nents or parts of a work of art that can be isolated and
defined.” When combined through principles of
design such as balance, pattern, and emphasis, “they
are the building blocks used to create a work of art.”
Function, cultural significance, and even subject mat-
ter are not part of traditional formal analysis. There is
no touching, smelling, or listening. Despite the domi-
nance of a sense—vision—formal analysis is inher-
ently Cartesian. Distinctions of meaning/mind versus
experience/body are reproduced through museums’
“look but don’t touch; scrutinize but don’t experi-
ence” rubric (Petrov 2011, 231).
Formal analysis also is a confidence-building
approach for novice learners unfamiliar with visual
analysis (Rice and Yenawine 2002). Its highly struc-
tured nature ensures sustained, imaginative engage-
ment. It may push students to think outside their
own experiences—at least to the artist’s—and con-
sider intent and effect in ways they would not other-
wise. Students tend to rely on text for meaning
making or intellectual validation, so the absence of
text in this technique provides critical skill building.
But the “elements of art” are obviously an artificial
typology. Its imposition, especially upon items pro-
duced outside the Western art canon, may be not only
unhelpful but also culturally inappropriate. As tradi-
tionally presented, formal analysis does not acknowl-
edge this problem but, rather, obscures it through a
universalizing framework of aesthetic evaluation.
Deep looking is less structured than formal analy-
sis while still relying on the “isolated attentive
147
decolonizing collections-based learning
looking” characteristic of art historical study (Berg
and Seeber 2016; Rice and Yenawine 2002). In this
technique, students spend an hour or more in sus-
tained visual contemplation. They record their
stream-of-consciousness impressions via text,
sketches, and/or audio. Later, they order and trans-
late these impressions for an audience (either the
instructor or alone or joined by class members via
presentation). Jennifer Roberts (2013) described her
take on deep looking in a 2013 teaching innovation
conference at Harvard University: “the first thing I
ask them to do in the research process is to spend a
painfully long time looking at that object.” Roberts
(2013) stresses the temporal component of deep
looking: “what students learn in a visceral way in this
assignment is that in any work of art there are details
and orders and relationships that take time to per-
ceive.” Such embodied, visual, immersive engage-
ment is a powerful foundation on which to build an
interpretive project.
Deep looking jettisons formal analysis’s rigid
typology and makes more room for individual sub-
jectivity. For example, unless directed otherwise, stu-
dents might produce a research-driven essay on
origins and context or a personal account of their
affective reactions (Lasserre 2012). Like formal analy-
sis, however, deep looking a priori posits a relation-
ship between what a student perceives in a work and
what its makers or users intended. For example, of
her own deep looking, Roberts (2013, 42) recounts:
It took me nine minutes to notice that the shape
of the boy’s ear precisely echoes that of the ruff
along the squirrel’s belly—and that Copley was
making some kind of connection between the
animal and the human body and the sensory
capacities of each.
These insights into semiotic intent are plausible
when derived by a practiced scholar studying not-
very-ancient art within her own cultural tradition.
They would become less so as temporal and cultural
distance grows, exacerbated by the inexperience of
many students.
For my teaching goals, therefore, deep looking is
not critical enough about the interpretive authority it
bestows. In striving for visual literacy, looking assign-
ments can enact an extension of the imperial gaze—
without acknowledging it as such. In deep looking,
148
students interpret from their own standpoints but are
not required to acknowledge that fact. By imposing
aesthetic appreciation, this mode of engagement also
affords a fetishistic gaze. That is, distanced looking,
motivated by a desire for visual pleasure, necessarily
raises complex issues of appropriation and longing
(especially when coupled with the self-discipline and
denial of touch inherent in most contemporary Wes-
tern museum experiences; Foucault 1995). These
effects are contrary to museum anthropology’s goals
of critical, reflexive engagement with collected things,
as well as to the broader goals of a decolonizing schol-
arly practice.
By overlooking materialism and materiality, deep
looking also fails to impart a material literacy.
Although embodied and practical, the methodology
is rarely acknowledged as such. Even if phenomeno-
logical concerns are raised (Roberts 2013), vision is
uniquely privileged over other senses. This orienta-
tion undermines the idea, fundamental to social the-
ory in anthropology and elsewhere, that cultural
reproduction is inherently practical and embodied
(Bourdieu 1977; de Certeau 1984; Gell 1998; Latour
1993; Miller, ed. 2005). There also is no consideration
of the “things-in-motion that illuminate their human
and social context”—no sense of things having ongo-
ing social lives (Appadurai 1986, 5). Without a peda-
gogical structure to prompt them, students may
perceive things as frozen in a museum moment of
contemplation.
Other drawbacks emerge from the isolated nature
of these approaches. Collaboration is one of many
skills currently extolled by liberal arts educational
models. Group exercises create a polysemous, dialec-
tic approach to perception. Everyone can be “aware
of his or her own role in the emergent, collective pro-
cess of interpretation” (Burnham 2011, 144). Formal
analysis and deep looking depend on sustained, iso-
lated contemplation, however. A relationship is
formed between viewer and object, but it is not a mul-
tivocal or collaborative experience (unless group dis-
cussion happens at a later time, after interpretations
have cemented).
Material: Properties Analysis
Material literacy should be a core competency of
object-based learning, making the concept of
materiality (in contrast to visuality) fundamental.

A mandate to attend to “the multiple sensory
dimensions of objects, architectures, and land-
scapes” follows (Howes 2006, 161). An attention
to material properties advances a “sensual revolu-
tion” and is now a “central tenet of material cul-
ture theory” broadly understood (Howes 2006,
161). Approaches to material culture/materiality
and embodiment are a corrective response to pri-
oritizing the linguistic and visual. What formal
analysis or “deep looking” is in the visual world
of art history, “properties analysis” is in the mate-
rial and embodied world of archaeology/anthro-
pology. Yet, as the following case study
demonstrates, material-centered study also risks
essentializing—even colonizing—the meaning of
things (Crossland and Bauer 2017; Fowles 2016).
In fall of 2012, the Material Culture section of
University College London’s (UCL) Department of
Anthropology undertook a research project they
called Properties and Social Imagination (Drazin et al.
2013). The staff began as so many university-based
projects do: working with what they had. Resources
included ethnography collections with great material
presence but little to no documentation. Their fram-
ing questions were exploratory and interdisciplinary:
• What kinds of cultural information, context,
and knowledge may be found in the form of the
object itself?
• What kinds of research methods can be devel-
oped from a focus on the material or physical
properties of objects?
• What methods can we, as anthropologists, con-
tribute to others (material scientists, artists, and
so on) working with materials? (2013, 7).
The project thus replaced traditional museum
research methods, which begin with institutional
documentation and secondary literature review, with
approaches of materiality, affordances, and sensory
engagement.
The 2012 project chose three objects: a piece of
unadorned barkcloth from Indonesia, a greenstone
adze from Papua New Guinea, and a carved wooden
spear thrower from Australia. They broke students
into small groups and spent hours interrogating the
objects by observing material qualities that prompted
generative questions, moving outward to context and
meaning through archival research, and partnering
decolonizing collections-based learning
with scientists and artists who lent their skills to
achieve ever more complex understandings. Adam
Drazin et al. (2013, 6) soon discovered that “the for-
mal qualities of cloth, stone, and wood create[d] new
cultural sensibilities and new collaborative research
practices.”
For the adze, they explored the physical properties
of stone, moving between individual and collective
experience to envision material potential, as well as to
access the past agentive relationships between stone
and person. The barkcloth’s smell, texture, and
appearance led to three lines of inquiry: “the bark-
cloth as a traveling medium,” barkcloth production
as a physical “process that transforms” bark into a
textile with new properties, and the sensual nature of
barkcloth as a textile. They describe the spear thrower
as “beautiful, functional, mysterious, powerful, and
potentially tragic.” They wrestled especially with the
categories into which they tried to put the spear
thrower. They began by wondering about this item
(what it was, how it was used) and ended up wonder-
ing about themselves (how do we construct typolo-
gies, how do we construct understandings of others’
objects, how is colonialism reactivated in anthropol-
ogy collections).
As contributors explain in the project report, the
crucial lesson is that ethnographic objects should
serve as more than data or proof of theoretical con-
cept. Instructors “used the sensory experience of the
objects as the starting point to engage with the cul-
tural uses and practices that these objects inhabit” in
the present and inhabited in the past (Drazin et al.
2013, 7). The UCL model emphasizes imagination
and experimentation in material culture research. In
my experience, students can be reluctant to interpret
material culture. Focusing on students’ embodied
encounters with physical objects lends them author-
ity—permission—to engage their senses and the ways
things act upon them. The project integrated individ-
ual and collaborative work, supporting skills of com-
munication and cooperation. UCL focused especially
on processes of making while accounting for multiple
senses, which led students through a powerful inter-
pretive, affective experience. The project also
unfolded over the course of several weeks, incorpo-
rating long object sessions. This pace is not always
possible, but I believe students benefit from such
slowed, sustained focus.
149
decolonizing collections-based learning
Despite these many strengths, properties analysis
shares certain drawbacks with formal analysis and
deep looking. It is similarly acontextual, at least in its
early phases. Traditional qualitative research, which
creates contextual understanding in advance of inter-
pretation via literature review and primary sources, is
not essential. Its absence invites a disconnect between
meaning assigned by the novice viewer (assuming no
preexisting cultural understanding) and that
intended by the maker/user. The intent not only of
those who made and used an item, but also of
present-day community members, may also be
marginalized. Community-derived meanings are not
the only meanings of things, but excluding them risks
compounding historic acts of cultural appropriation.
Material properties analysis does not demand that
students consider the cultural consequences to source
communities of the taking of these collections or how
items relate to persistent traditional practices.
In the absence of multiple culturally derived per-
spectives, free-form interpretation risks fetishizing
the study object, however mundane it may be. For
example, UCL students began work with the adze by
“smelling, licking, visually examining, touching, and
even listening” (Drazin et al. 2013, 14, 21), writing
of its persistent mystery. The fetishizing of museum
collections may be inescapable, but it should be
problematized (Loren 2015). Materials property
analysis, at least as championed by UCL, does not
address the issue.
Physical encounter is a crucial first step in object
engagement. However, one can have too much “ma-
terial against materiality” (sensu Ingold 2007)—that
is, an asymmetrical attention to physical properties
without attention to entangled human actors. Fowles
(2016, 9) recently criticized “treating non-human
objects as quasi-human subjects” as a neocolonial
grasp at power, suggesting that “things proved safer
to study than people.” While I think he overstates the
prevalence of such asymmetrical anthropology, he is
right to caution against the displacement of human
subjectivities in favor of object agency. During
instruction, we must take care to frame materiality
not as the study of object agents instead of people, or
even objects alongside people, but of the codependent
production of society by human and object actors.
Further, materiality study should probe human/ob-
ject practices across the many social and temporal
150
contexts in which an item participates—up to and
including students’ own engagements with it.
This approach serves material literacy very well.
But it runs counter to pedagogical goals of reflexivity
and cultural competency (which, as described above,
link anthropological and twenty-first-century learn-
ing priorities). For example, Drazin et al. (2013, 12)
admit:
Our relationship with the adze was formed
through physical engagement and embodying
knowledge and not by predominantly gathering
knowledge in a “conventional” academic fash-
ion. We therefore find it appropriate to try and
reconstruct that path as opposed to present
what is normally understood to be the “ethno-
graphic” facts of the adze head. The main ques-
tion of the research was how one could relate to
a perceivably voiceless object.
The adze is unlikely to be perceived as “voiceless”
by everybody—just by those lacking certain cultural
understandings. UCL students decided the adze’s
properties could be separated into “natural” and
“cultural.” This binary is important in Western
philosophies but is not universal or objective (and, in
fact, is one of the binaries the new materialism strives
to overcome).
Project members also concluded that their engage-
ment with this adze was analogous to that of prescient
Papua New Guinea stone hunters, who saw axes in
visions (Drazin et al. 2013, 23). I find the equivalency
troubling, but it is not critiqued within the project
report. The statement demonstrates how the proper-
ties analysis model easily dissociates source communi-
ties, exacerbating museums’ “lost body problem”
(Feldman 2006; see also Petrov 2011). The conse-
quences are complex. Among many positive outcomes,
it appears that this object’s impact on students largely
displaced their concern with its impact on others. This
result may have been intentional, but it is not some-
thing I seek in my own teaching outcomes. Properties
analysis is a compelling, multisensory model. It pro-
vides welcome space for students’ subjectivity to con-
tribute to meaning making. But it may leave too much
open to interpretation, especially when working with
another community’s things.
There are many ways to integrate multiple cultural
perspectives into object-based teaching. Direct

consultation with makers and cultural experts is the
most powerful. Given time and resource constraints,
as well as the nature of collections and documenta-
tion, it is not always practicable in student-curated
projects. Decolonization is a process, however, rather
than a destination. Its methods are not limited to col-
laboration or consultation. For example, polysemy,
the explicit acknowledgment of curatorial stand-
points (i.e., not speaking for indigenous communities
but as researchers encountering and benefiting from
indigenous collections), and a transparent accounting
of collections’ origins can (and should) be used to
produce a more balanced understanding, even in the
absence of consultation. As Alex Barker (2017)
remarked in his discussion for the “Looking Ahead:
University Anthropology Museums Matter” execu-
tive session at the American Anthropological Associa-
tion annual meeting, teaching collections
“anthropologically” sometimes has little to do with
the objects themselves. Instead, it affords anthropo-
logical conversations about human diversity, empa-
thy, and social justice. It conveys to students the
responsibilities that emerge as part of responsible
research practices.
To this end, multiple and primary perspectives
can derive from preemptive instruction, assigned
readings, critical consideration of “ethnographic
facts,” awareness of indigenous research protocols,
and the integration of first- or secondhand source
community input (via oral interviews, online first-
person and community-generated content, publica-
tions by community scholars, etc.), as well as from
consultation. Without polysemy, crucial interpretive
friction is lacking. Perhaps UCL educators cautioned
students that their object senses might be different
from—even contradictory or inflammatory to—a
source community member’s. If so, this caveat does
not appear in their report. This absence suggests it
was not fundamental to their anthropological object
study. I believe it should be.
Proposal: Experiential Observation +
Synesthetic Analysis + Polysemous
Interpretation (ESP)
Overview
The proposed interdisciplinary model for experiential
object-based learning addresses the deficiencies of the
decolonizing collections-based learning
visual and material properties study described above:
“Experiential Observation + Synesthetic Analysis +
Polysemous Interpretation” (ESP). This semistruc-
tured approach leads students through a three-part
object engagement. The assignments impart both
material literacy and cultural competency. ESP also
explicitly connects social theory and learning practice
by broaching things as mediators in social relation-
ships. That is, they actively link and influence multi-
ple people, things, settings, and periods. Students
thus reflect on their role as one of multiple communi-
ties in situated engagement with collections. The
model arises from an anthropological/materialogical
orientation, as well as from my experience stewarding
multicultural collections, with all the responsibilities
to stakeholders that that entails (Sullivan and
Edwards 2004).
The ESP case study described below derives from
my 2015 course “Museum Cultures: Material Repre-
sentation in the Past and Present.” It is a museum
anthropology class that provides a critical look at the
history and legacies of anthropological collections.
Each year, I focus on a particular portion of the more
than 30,000 archaeological and ethnographic items in
the Stanford University Archaeology Collections
(SUAC). The course culminates in a student-curated
exhibition mounted in the public spaces of the Stan-
ford Archaeology Center. In 2015, we worked with
the Daggett Collection, an assemblage of late-nine-
teenth-century ethnographic items made by tribes of
the Trinity and Lower Klamath rivers region in Hum-
boldt County, northern California. Students’ engage-
ment with a single item in the Daggett Collection
exemplifies the ESP methodology. Assignment details
and examples of student work appear below (with
student permission to use unattributed). I have since
elaborated ESP into a structured, multistep scaffold-
ing, which is available online (Hodge 2017).
Step 1: Experiential Observation
Observation: Using sight to notice details, identifying
and describing qualities.
Experiential observation: Employing all available
senses to systematically attend to and describe the
material qualities of a study object.
I asked students to choose an object and per-
form haptic experiential observation, defined as
“multisensory analysis.” I explained the structured
151
decolonizing collections-based learning
component of a classic formal analysis, as well as
its limitations with respect to the materiality and
affordances of material culture. I trained students
in safe object handling and the elements of both
formal analysis and properties/sensory analysis,
which attends to qualities such as weight, smell,
texture, and size, relevant to their own embodied
perceptions. They were asked to
• Identify the piece and summarize the overall
size/impression/form.
• Engage with the piece via careful handling, as
appropriate, and describe overall materials/
techniques.
• Describe distinct elements, moving from one
area/side to the other in a regular way, following
your interest/physical manipulation.
• Note ALL physical properties: texture, wear,
smell, sound, and so on.
Students recorded their experience in words and
drawings and noted:
• Observations about the item (formal/material
analysis).
• Questions, speculations, and associations that
arise from your observations.
• Anything surprising, intriguing, or puzzling
about the item.
This exercise encourages slow, semistructured
learning. By implying that students will not a priori
understand an item, the prompt anticipates differ-
ences between a students’ subjectivities and the sub-
jectivities of an item’s maker. Students understand
that this analysis is not the end of interpretation but
its beginning.
One student, Isabella Robbins (Stanford Univer-
sity, BA 2017), chose a maple bark skirt, and her
responses illustrate the successful application of ESP
(Figures 1 and 2). Her creative observations consider
materiality, object agency, and embodiment. For
example, she wrote:
• I wonder if the color variation might be from
just the original natural coloring of the tree its
material comes from or could it be from the sun
or water exposure?
• The three pieces used to hold the skirt together
at the top are connected to form the string/
rope/piece that will be tied around the wearer’s
waist.
152
Figure 1. Maple bark skirt (Object ID 8919), detail. This item was made by
a young Hupa, Karuk, or Yurok woman in Humboldt County, California, in
the late nineteenth century. Photograph by Christina J. Hodge (2015). Cour-
tesy Stanford University Archaeology Collections of the Stanford Archaeol-
ogy Center. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.]
• I wonder if this skirt would be worn until it
became too damaged or frail and then it would
be returned to the earth?
• Like many objects, it probably was not intended
to be in a museum or archival setting.
• When worn, I imagine it would make noises as
the different strands brush together.
These comments show how anthropological ideas
of embodiment and materiality can productively
combine with haptic experiential observation. This
student met goals for the assignment, expressing both
cultural competency and material literacy in her
work.
Step 2: Synesthetic Analysis
Analysis: A critical consideration; extrapolates inten-
tion or meaning.
Synesthetic analysis: Uses multisensory observa-
tions (from Step 1) to explicate a study object’s possi-
ble affordances, meanings, and significances, as well
as the possible intentions of its creators and users
in the past and present, bearing in mind one’s own
subjectivity.
Synesthetic analysis draws explicitly on both the
observations and the questions generated during
experiential observation (Step 1). It continues to
integrate anthropological concepts such as materi-
ality, embodiment, phenomenology, and affor-
dances. It also furthers student consideration of

Figure 2. Maple bark skirt (Object ID 8919) on display during installation of the student-curated exhibition From Curios” to Ambassadors: Changing Roles
of the Daggett Collection from Tribes of the Lower Klamath River. Photograph by Christina J. Hodge (2015). Courtesy Stanford University Archaeology Collec-
tions of the Stanford Archaeology Center. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.]
subjectivity and the multiple, context-dependent
meanings of objects. It was at this stage that I split
my students into project teams, and they began
researching their selected items. This strategy intro-
duced collaborative meaning making into the
methodology. Multiple primary and secondary
sources were used, some identified by me, some by
the students. I made sure we discussed issues of
bias within scholarly sources, both old and new.
We studied the objects biographically, considering
provenance and the ways items such as the bark
skirt generated meaning through their circulation
from tribe to collector to museum to exhibit.
To ensure that these objects were perceived as
active beyond our project, and to communicate the
survivance of source communities, I directed students
to current tribal web pages and other contemporary
sources generated by Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk com-
munity members. The bark skirt team, for example,
read a recent article by a Hupa woman about her bark
skirt (Brooks 2014). I invited cultural experts Walter
Lara, Melodie George-Moore, and Glen Moore from
the Hoopa Valley and Yurok tribes to visit the items
and discuss them with our class (and begin conversa-
tions about how we might support their community
goals through ongoing scholarship). Chance Carpen-
ter (Stanford University, BA 2015), of the Hoopa Val-
ley Tribe, also attended. Kayla Carpenter Begay
(Stanford University, BA 2010), Hoopa Valley Tribe,
had previously contributed notes on Daggett
decolonizing collections-based learning
Collection items to the SUAC database while an
undergraduate. I was extremely fortunate that these
individuals maintain strong ties to Stanford Univer-
sity, especially through the Stanford University
Native American Cultural Center.
Hearing directly from cultural experts powerfully
transformed the students’ sense of collections as
active objects with significance beyond campus. Stu-
dents witnessed a different approach to their handling
and interpretation than I could impart. The skirt was
among the items Ms. George-Moore addressed (per-
sonal communication, 2015). She explained its gen-
dering, its ceremonial production as part of a girl’s
coming-of-age ceremony, how it would have been
washed and laid in the sun to dry, and how the style
of waist knots differs from woman to woman. She
smelled it, noting its lingering scent and its audible
rustle. Her observations related to her physical
manipulation of the skirt. Several of her insights were
similar to the students’ or directly addressed student
questions. This engagement is a premier example of
explication through synesthetic analysis. Moreover, it
powerfully illustrates the importance of cultural rele-
vance and subjectivity.
Step 3: Polysemous Interpretation
Interpretation: Drawing on analytical insights about
a study object to suggest plausible explanations for
observed qualities or deduced meanings and signifi-
cances.
153
decolonizing collections-based learning
Polysemous interpretation: Drawing on analyti-
cal insights about a study object to suggest plausible
explanations for observed qualities or deduced mean-
ings and significances considering multiple contextu-
alizing sources and standpoints, in particular those
from makers and source communities.
I asked students to use their experiential observa-
tions and synesthetic analysis to produce polysemous
interpretations in their final exhibit labels. The title of
last year’s exhibit was From Curios to Ambassadors:
Changing Roles of the Daggett Collection from Tribes of
the Lower Klamath River. Ms. Robbins and her project
teammate, Alanna Simao (Stanford University, BA
2017), included the bark skirt in their exhibit case on
“The Cultures of Clothing.” They wrote:
Clothing connects people and cultures in physi-
cal ways. When worn, it becomes part of the self
and, therefore, part of the wearer’s identity, self-
representation, even spirituality. For [collector]
John R. Daggett, these clothing items became a
part of his identity as a collector. Clothing also
served as a mechanism of colonialism and resis-
tance, as Native people adopted and were forced
into wearing non-traditional attire. These items
became spectacles when they represented tribal
cultures at the Chicago Columbian Exposition
in 1893. Because of the differences between tra-
ditional clothing of the Lower Klamath River
peoples and introduced Euro-American styles,
attendees would have regarded these objects as
curios, things to wonder at or even possess.
Today, however, similar items are still worn by
tribal members and are sources of inspiration
for Native artists.
Their skirt label read:
Before colonial and modern clothing was intro-
duced to Lower Klamath River tribes, women
wore bark skirts like this one every day. Bark
skirts are still made and worn but are now typi-
cally used for special occasions and ceremonies.
They remain essential to the puberty Ihuk
(Flower Dance) ceremony, practiced by the
Karuk and other tribes. Maple bark skirts, and
their creation, have helped revitalize ceremonies
that had fallen out of practice. Today, as in the
past, young women make these skirts under the
154
guidance of older female mentors and are taught
valuable lessons about their cultures.
Labels such as these allow an evaluation of the
pedagogical goals I set out early in this study.
Students engaged in meaningful observations
about an object, and they were not limited to its visual
or material properties. They wrestled with their own
subjectivity and considered things from outside of
their own habituated standpoints, including from
multiple perspectives and at multiple historical peri-
ods. Their insights included critical reflection on the
collection’s current role as a museum object dis-
tanced from its source community. Crucially, they
also saw collected things as actively engaged with
communities beyond the confines of storage and dis-
play. ESP meets my goals as a museum educator. It
successfully integrates anthropological approaches to
material culture to impart cultural competency and
material literacy in a collaborative, creative, paced
learning environment.
Applications
The ESP model benefits from its interdisciplinary ped-
agogical structure. Art offers successful models of
visual literacy, semiotic engagement, and slow learn-
ing, while materialism and material properties analysis
advance material literacy. Anthropological approaches
to material culture offer concepts of materiality, affor-
dances, and embodiment, as well as polysemous signi-
fication, making them well-suited to object-based
teaching. Anthropology also promotes values of cul-
tural competency. ESP integrates all of the above
through a sustained, cumulative engagement.
The ESP scaffolding was developed for use during
a semester-long museum anthropology course, but its
application is interdisciplinary and modular. By
focusing on broad twenty-first-century skills and
material literacy, it enhances the ability of university
museums, whatever their type, to contribute across
disciplines. By switching to a discussion format,
rather than writing assignments, ESP has been
applied successfully to short, in-class engagements
with courses from a variety of departments (history,
Native Studies, introduction to research methods,
indigenous languages, archaeology, etc.). If time is a
factor, the sequence can be modified for fewer and
shorter sessions. The first step, experiential

observation, on its own supports goals of material lit-
eracy and cultural competency. It is the suggested
focus of shorter sessions. In this case, students are
asked to make experiential observations either alone
or in small groups (handling items if possible, imag-
ining handling and using them if not), noting what
they perceive and any questions that this engagement
inspires. These observations and questions then fuel
group discussion. Discussion is moderated, and ques-
tions answered, by an instructor, curator, and/or par-
ticipating cultural expert, who helps to contextualize
the item and introduce concepts of relativism, subjec-
tivity, and standpoint. This approach is suited both to
handling and gallery settings.
Conclusions
ESP is a multistaged, interdisciplinary framework for
collections-based learning. It offers an alternative to
visual approaches of art history/critique, as well as to
new materialist approaches of physical properties
analysis. Both of these orientations tend to presen-
tism and decontextualization, underserving cultural
relativism and reflexivity. Although it is still (and
should always be) a work in progress, the ESP
approach appears to ameliorate this bias successfully
by affording a crucial mindfulness—or “thing-ful-
ness”—to object-based learning. As ESP guides stu-
dents from multisensory observations to generative
questions to interpretive insights, they develop core
twenty-first-century skills, including critical and
cross-disciplinary thinking, creativity, expression,
and cultural competency.
The University of California, Berkeley recently
offered a new Big Ideas course called “The Humani-
ties.” Their Big Ideas program offers “breadth
courses” from multiple disciplines organized around
a central concept. In this case, the big idea was to
demonstrate the value of humanities in a STEM-
driven world by conceptualizing them as “the inter-
disciplinary study of different ways human groups live
as human beings” (Lombrozo 2015)—which doubles
as a definition of anthropology itself. Whether or not
you agree that the approach offered here is new, or
accept its disciplinary promiscuity, it stresses critical,
contextual examination of human cultures as a core
twenty-first-century skill. The ESP approach also fits
well within such initiatives as the Big Ideas program,
showing its potential for wider implementation.
decolonizing collections-based learning
Cultural collections (broadly construed) are
uniquely able to impart this skill. They materialize
“an opportunity both to apply approaches from
wider material culture studies to museum contexts
and to develop and extend” approaches to thinking
through objects (Dudley 2012, 3). As Sara Ahmed
(2008, 35) reminds us, “New developments in think-
ing within all disciplines—the sciences, social sciences
and humanities—often proceed from the collapse of
their objects [i.e., established disciplinary subjects].”
ESP may not be appropriate for all collections-based
engagements. But—by leading students to multisen-
sory, interdisciplinary experiences of contextualized
materiality—it does offer a method distinct from
visual and/or material properties analyses. With
appropriate framing, university cultural collections
can develop students’ skills while pushing broader
understandings of cultural reproduction and materi-
ality itself.
Acknowledgments
I thank editor Lea McChesney, editorial manager Laura
Steele, copy editor June-el Piper, and former editorial
manager and copy editor Christine Weeber for their sup-
port during the production process and feedback on drafts
of this article. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for
their close readings and helpful perspectives. External con-
sultants Chance Carpenter, Kayla Carpenter Begay, Melo-
die George-Moore, and Glen Moore, Hoopa Valley Tribe,
and Walter Lara, Yurok Tribe, generously shared their
expertise during development of the Daggett Collection
exhibition. At Stanford, Karen Biestman, director of the
Native American Cultural Center; Catherine Hale, former
curator for Africa and the Americas, Cantor Center for
Visual Arts; and Laura Jones, director of Heritage Services,
also shared time and expertise. This article was inspired by
the creative, thoughtful work of Isabella Robbins, Alanna
Simao, and all the students in my courses.
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