The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review, Issue 26/2021

The Museum of the Romanian Peasant is seeking contributions for its annual journal Martor 26/2021, on the topic of Visual Ethics after Communism. Martor is a peer-reviewed academic journal, established in 1996, indexed by EBSCO, Index Copernicus, CEEOL, AIO, and MLA International Bibliography, with a focus on cultural and visual anthropology, ethnology and museology.

This special issue to appear in 2021 will problematize the often-uncritical use of images in publications and displays about communism. This themed issue will pose a number of questions for anthropologists, historians, museologists and others. When does an image or a museum display present itself as problematic and for whom? Under what circumstances is it ethically justifiable to exhibit or publish such images or, conversely, to put images aside, leaving them undisplayed? When do arguments based on “the public good” outweigh the right to personal privacy, individual integrity and cultural patrimony of source communities? Inspired by recent debates on the ethics of the use of Holocaust and atrocity photography and colonial-era images of indigenous ‘others’, the contributions to this issue will address the use of images of unwilling participants taken through a hostile lens. The issue invites researchers and curators to find inspiration in various kinds of archives: both personal and institutional.