Date of Award

1-1-2019

Document Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Organizational Unit

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Anthropology

First Advisor

Bonnie Clark, Ph.D.

Keywords

Amache, Amache Museum, Community collaborations, Identity, Japanese American internment camps

Abstract

The Amache Museum is a preservation project that has multiple communities involved in preserving Amache history. It represents Japanese American as well as American history and is owned and maintained by the Amache Preservation Society (APS), which is comprised of local Granada High School students. By approaching the Amache Museum as a community museum and noticing its distinct collaborative strategy, this thesis investigates the community collaborations and the identity affirmations within the museum, and addresses the question of whose community museum the Amache Museum represents. My research explores the overlapping conceptual models of the Amache Museum: community museum and ecomuseum, and utilizes the realities of a difficult heritage to discuss identity affirmation through the use of individual and collective memories. Through participant observations, archival research, semi-structured interviews, and a questionnaire survey, this thesis identifies three community collaborations, as well as community members' thoughts of the importance of the museum for the Japanese Americans and Granada community. Recognizing that the museum and Amache site may be incorporated in the U.S. National Park Service in the future, this thesis also presents a glance at the potential positive and negative aspects if the governing agency is involved, and provides recommendations for future management.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Ting-chun Huang

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

145 p.

Discipline

Museum studies

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