As part of Conferencias Caribeñas 12 Series, the Institute of Caribbean Studies at the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras invites the academic community and the public at large to the lecture “Laundering Culture: Power and the Production of Museum Exhibits” by Dr. Sally Price (Duane A. and Virginia S. Dittman Professor Emerita of American Studies and Anthropology, College of William & Mary). Dr. Chloé S. Georas (Law School, UPR-RP) will introduce the speaker.

The lecture will take place on Tuesday, March 5, 2013, at 1:00-3:30pm at the Manuel Maldonado Denis Amphitheatre in the Carmen Rivera de Alvarado Building (CRA 108), School of Social Sciences, UPR-RP.

Description: Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History demonstrates the power of silences in history, and the agendas that lie behind them. This lecture transposes his argument to the realm of museum exhibitions and points to the ways in which ethnographic materials can be stripped of their original cultural meanings (and sometimes even altered in their physical form) in order to suit the agendas of participants in the museum making process – whether politicians, curators, donors, architects, or others. National pride, aesthetic preferences, practical constraints, and various unacknowledged forms of ethnocentrism are seen as driving the laundering of distant cultures in the space of a museum gallery. Examples will be taken from major museums in Amsterdam, Madrid and Paris.

All lectures will be broadcast LIVE online through the following website: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cc71***

Comments and suggestions on the presentation will be welcome at iec-ics@upr.edu

For further information, you may call Dr. Humberto García Muñiz, Director, at (787) 764-0000, extension 4212, or write to iec@uprrp.edu

Also see The Institute of Caribbean Studies on FACEBOOK