Museums
name: label: Collection Creator
content: Karp, Ivan
setName: label: See more items in
content: Ivan Karp papers
label: See more items in
content: Ivan Karp papers / Series 6: Born Digital Files / 6.1: Writings and Projects / Museums Studies
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1989 May-1996 November
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: National Anthropological Archives
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: This folder has files related to some of Karp's work on and in museums/exhibitions while he was at the Smithsonian and the first few years at Emory. It includes abstracts for talks (given at CAA meetings, in New Zealand, etc.); comments/memos on a range of topics, including controversy over the Enola Gay exhibit, his consultancy work for LA Festival, some meetings about exhibits, and methods for visitor research; brief fieldnote descriptions (e.g. Worker's Museum in Denmark); reviews of manuscripts and proposals concerning museums and exhibitions; and a draft plan for an African exhibition at the Smithsonian. There are also files for the Exhibiting Cultures and Museums and Communities volumes (also present in folder "PAPERS").

Subfolder "Bushmen" contains some research that Karp commissioned from Caroline Jeannerat in 1992 (she was a student working with Carolyn Hamilton at Wits.). The four files are explained in the letter at the end of the file "INFONOTE." Karp asked her to find out what kind of coverage and responses there had been to reports of 1979 killings of Bushmen by S African soldiers, which had been reported as "hunting" in some cases. Karp was looking into this both in relation to his research with Kratz on representations of cultural difference and in relation to the Bushman diorama at NMNH.

Subfolder "KarpKratzProjects" holds files related to joint research and writing projects that Karp and Kratz developed in the early 1990s. They developed several research proposals, submitted to NSF and to at least two internal Smithsonian funds (at least one was successful). Files relate to different versions and sections of these applications, as well as letters and comments on their Disney World paper. The subfolder "Tippoo" has various versions, draft sections, colleague's comments and other information for what became their 2000 publication "Reflections on the fate of Tippoo's Tiger," which first began as a public lecture that Karp presented at the Getty Research Center in 1991. There are other Tippoo-related files in the folder "PAPERS."

Subfolder "Tapes" are transcriptions from tape recordings that Kratz and Karp made during their research as they visited museums and exhibits – the Field Museum, the Geffrye Museum, Victoria & Albert and Museum of Mankind in London, and the "African Reflections" exhibition about Mangbetu and Azande at the American Museum of Natural History. Some are excerpts from the full transcription (e.g. "AFRICA.FLD" AND "TRAVPAC.FLD" and both part of the overall transcription "FIELD.WP"). The Mangbetu transcription ends with an interview with an unidentified woman, likely Enid Schildkrout, the exhibition's curator. Karp wrote a review of the exhibit (see "PAPERS" folder). Some of these transcriptions were done by Robert Leopold, who worked for Karp at the Smithsonian, and reviewed by Kratz.