Decolonizing Collections‐Based Learning:Experiential Observation as an Interdisciplinary Framework for Object Study

Abstract

Abstract This paper introduces a structured interdisciplinary framework for collections‐based learning. The scaffolding combines 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 properties of matter. Both visual and materialist approaches tend toward presentism and decontextualization. They intrinsically privilege the viewer's standpoint and interpretations over those of makers, users, and descendant community 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 culture can enhance visual and material approaches by culturally 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, multisensory observation, and reflexive, polysemous cultural interpretation. The framework offers an interdisciplinary, decolonizing method of object study. [anthropology, materiality, object‐based learning, pedagogy, visuality]

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