From the ancient steppes of the Near East to the Silk Road, from the early modern Mediterranean to the settlement of the Americas, material culture has both shaped and been shaped by the complex dynamics of cultural encounter and exchange. Whether through global economic transactions, voluntary migration, or forced diaspora, contact between people spreads materials, motifs, techniques, and technologies, all of which are absorbed, adapted, and transformed to meet local needs. Imperial conquest and colonial expansion result in unbalanced political relations while introducing new opportunities for material expression and assertions of agency. In the specific context of settler colonialism, Indigenous people and objects become implicated in overlapping realms of governance, land management, ethnological knowledge production, museum collecting, and artworld development. At BGC, faculty bring interdisciplinary, global, and transhistorical perspectives to the ways in which material culture mediates cultural encounters.
Courses have focused on the reception of European objects in Asia (and vice versa), Trans-Atlantic and Pacific worlds, exhibiting “Africa,” colonial encounter and Indigenous arts in the Americas, and immigration, enslavement, and American identity. Our institutional partnership with the American Museum of Natural History supports postdoctoral fellowships and provides students with research opportunities in one of the world’s premier ethnographic collections; Focus Exhibitions resulting from this program include Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast, Confluences: An American Expedition to Northern Burma, 1935, and Frontier Shores: Collection, Entanglement, and the Manufacture of Identity in Oceania. Main gallery exhibitions have explored themes of global cultural encounter and exchange, including John Lockwood Kipling: Arts & Crafts in the Punjab and London, and Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick. Scholarly symposia have led to related publications, such as The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography and The Anthropology of Expeditions: Travel, Visualities, Afterlives.
Courses have focused on the reception of European objects in Asia (and vice versa), Trans-Atlantic and Pacific worlds, exhibiting “Africa,” colonial encounter and Indigenous arts in the Americas, and immigration, enslavement, and American identity. Our institutional partnership with the American Museum of Natural History supports postdoctoral fellowships and provides students with research opportunities in one of the world’s premier ethnographic collections; Focus Exhibitions resulting from this program include Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast, Confluences: An American Expedition to Northern Burma, 1935, and Frontier Shores: Collection, Entanglement, and the Manufacture of Identity in Oceania. Main gallery exhibitions have explored themes of global cultural encounter and exchange, including John Lockwood Kipling: Arts & Crafts in the Punjab and London, and Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick. Scholarly symposia have led to related publications, such as The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography and The Anthropology of Expeditions: Travel, Visualities, Afterlives.
