Bringing History Alive
Material Culture and Multifaceted Identity: The Making of Faqir Khana - a Private Museum
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Saadia Abid
This study explores the process of accumulation of value in material culture preserved in museums such that it renders distinct identity or identities to its makers. The making of the Faqir Khana museum, one of the largest private museums in Pakistan, has helped the creators construct specific and multifaceted familial identity. The paper discusses museum as semiophore comprised of multiple signs; the narratives surrounding material culture function as signifiers to the varied aspects of family identity as signified. The museum helps explain the historic, inherited, and continued nature of familial identity. Proponents of interfaith peaceful co-existence, indigeneity, active citizenship; custodians of history; and connoisseurs of art and artifacts emerge as prominent aspects of identity. The research makes use of ethnographic methods. Data has been collected through indepth interviews of the family members. A special emphasis was on narrative encompassing artifacts and archival material existing therein. The museum has been established by members of Faqir family whose ancesters have served in illustrious positions in Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s court, a prominent Sikh leader of Punjab. The study discusses symbolic as well as functional value of objects displayed in museums.
The Country They Have All Dreamed of: Case of a Special Exhibition of the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ahrum Lee, Sunhee Rho
As the colonial period finally ended on August 15, 1945, stirrings in preparation for a new society were seen throughout the Korean Peninsula. The effort to establish a proper national framework was not confined to independence fighters or political leaders. Journalists, publishers and intellectuals, whose freedom of expression was denied during under the Japanese imperial regime, began to raise their voices over the path in which the country should proceed. Laborers and farmers strove to protect their production sites. They struggled to gain their social rights in the face of copious restrictions. The three years needed to establish a government formally after Liberation was a time of political chaos. Ideology is neither simply an issue for social leaders alone nor something dichotomously split into left and right political camps. Voices on all sides of the dense ideological spectrum were raised until the social leadership had emerged from the people, and the Korean people had finally become the principle movers of their own society. The establishment of the Republic of Korea government in August 1948 was made possible by this collective energy. The exhibition titled The Country They Have All Dreamed Of, explored in this paper, covers the period between Liberation from Japanese colonial rule in August 1945 to the establishment of the government in August 1948, focusing on the new social vision for which diverse sectors of Korean society yearned as well as on the determination and exertion put forth realize that vision.
