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Leah Dilworth
Academic Specialties & Research Interests
My current interest is collecting--not making my own collections,
but studying collecting as a discourse, that is, how collections
make meaning. For example, museums house collections of all
kinds of objects and display them with the assumption that
visitors will somehow come to understand art or history or
biology or cosmology by looking at them. How do these "object
lessons" work? What epistemological assumptions are at
work here? Who makes the collections and how do they decide
what to collect? One can ask these questions about private
collections as well, from the "serious" art collector
to the obsessive collector of memorabilia. My interest in
collecting grew out of my work on primitivism and Native Americans.
As I studied the images and writings about them, I became
aware that collecting cultural artifacts was one of several
modes of representation by which non-Natives learned about
Indians. But like any representation, their meaning is somewhat
unstable and may change in different contexts. I became fascinated
with how objects signify as they move across and through cultures.
Publications
Book:
Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions
of a Primitive Past. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1996. (Paperback edition published Spring 1998.)
Edited Volume:
Acts of Possession: Collecting in America. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2003.
Articles:
"Representing the Hopi Snake Dance." Journal
for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement. 11:4/
12:1 (2002/03): 453-496. Reprint of Chapter One, Imagining
Indians in the Southwest.
"'Handmade by an American Indian': Souvenirs and the
Cultural Economy of Southwestern Tourism." The Culture
of Tourism and the Tourism of Culture. Ed. Hal Rothman.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003.
"Tourists and Indians in Fred Harvey's Southwest."
Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West.
Ed. David M. Wrobel and Patrick T. Long. Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 2001. 142-164. (Revision of Chapter 2 in
Imagining Indians in the Southwest.)
"The Indian in Popular Culture." The Oxford
Companion to United States History. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001.
"(Re)collections of a Texan Girlhood." Journal
of the American Studies Association of Texas 28 (October
1997): 1-13.
"Discovering Indians in Fred Harvey's Southwest."
The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the
Santa Fe Railway. Eds. Marta Weigle and Barbara Babcock.
Phoenix: The Heard Museum, 1996. 159-167.
"A Souvenir of Las Vegas: Meditations on a Dice Clock."
Halcyon 17 (1995): 145-155.
"Rhythm Nation: Modernism and Primitivism in Mary Austin's
American Rhythm." Democratic Vistas1 (Autumn 1993):
6-26.
Reviews:
Review of Ann Ronald's Ghost West: Reflections of Past
and Present (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002).
Western Historical Quarterly (Winter 2003): 528-529.
Review of Sherry L. Smith's Reimagining Indians: Native
Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000). American Studies 43 (Fall
2002): 127-128.
"Breakthrough Books: Tourism." Lingua Franca
(November 1999): 46-47.
Review of Lois P. Rudnick's Utopian Vistas (University
of New Mexico Press, 1996). The Western Historical Quarterly
(Winter 1997).
Review of Curtis Hinsley and David Wilcox's The Southwest
in the American Imagination: The Writings of Sylvester Baxter,
1881-1889 (University of Arizona Press, 1996). Journal
of Anthropological Research 53 (1997): 246-247.
"Object Lessons," review of two exhibitions: "American
Encounters" (National Museum of American History) and
"Objects of Myth and Memory" (The Brooklyn Museum)
American Quarterly 45 (June 1993): 257-280.
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