Saturday University: Museums, Collections and Social Repair

Welcome to Saturday University, a monthly lecture series featuring experts from around the world. Gain new insights on Asia throughout time as our visiting scholars, authors, artists, and thought leaders delve into new themes each season.

Museums, Collections and Social Repair: Transforming the Past in Vietnam

Graeme Were

Explore the role of Vietnamese museums in transforming loss and suffering into forms of positivity and justice. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted inside and outside museums, this talk will reveal how military collections such as soldiers’ possessions, old photographs and surveillance reports are instrumental vehicles for effecting the process of repair and recovery after family loss and trauma. Ordinary people and families access these collections to complete the ritual work for the dead and also to seek state recognition and reparation payments for family relatives’ sacrifice in conflicts against the French and the Americans. In ‘reinhabiting’ museum objects through their access, display and veneration, this talk argues that the museum can be understood as a new kind of productive site of future-making and vernacular memory which ties into modes of political recognition, religiosity, and well-being.

Graeme Were is Honorary Professorial Associate in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. His research interests include museum anthropology, heritage and material culture studies, and he has a regional specialism in Vietnam and Papua New Guinea. Recent monographs include ‘Museums, Collections and Social Repair in Vietnam’ (Routledge 2022) and ‘How Materials Matter: Design, Innovation and Materiality in the Pacific’ (Berghahn 2019).