Posterity Is Now: Practicing Museum Anthropology, Collections Care, and Collaborative Research with Indigenous Peoples

Posterity Is Now is about doing--about how to do--museum anthropology, collections stewardship, and collaborative research based on working in collaboration with Indigenous communities. Guided by values-centered practice, this book shows how following Indigenous communities’ lead, being flexible, and creating a welcoming environment to build essential relationships can reorient museums to support cultural continuity instead of merely preserving objects.

In this handbook based on over twenty years of teaching and practice at the intersection of museums, anthropology, and Indigenous peoples, Jennifer A. Shannon covers both the theoretical (i.e., exploring the idea of objects as kin) and the pragmatic (i.e., guidelines for how to design and budget collaborative projects). She advocates for fundamental change in how anthropological research design and practice are done within and beyond the museum and how leadership and staff view the very purpose of the museum. She also demonstrates how collaborative museum anthropology can be a model for the fields of anthropology, public scholarship, and social science research more broadly.

Posterity Is Now is a starting point, a ＂companion to practice,＂ written in accessible language and equally relevant for use in university classrooms, by qualitative researchers, and by practitioners in museums and cultural centers.

Jennifer A. Shannon is a curator and associate professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of Our Lives: Collaboration, Native Voice, and the Making of the National Museum of the American Indian and a coproducer of the ongoing series NAGPRA Comics.