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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Museums & museology
This volume brings together a range of essays that offer a new perspective on the dynamic history of the museum as a cultural institution in South Asia. It traces the museum from its origin as a tool of colonialism and adoption as a vehicle of sovereignty in the nationalist period, till its role in the present, as it reflects the fissured identities of the post-colonial period.
Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum provides new thinking on exhibitions of global art and world art in relation to university museums. Taking The Fowler Museum at UCLA, USA, as its central subject, this edited collection traces how university museum practices have expanded the understanding of the 'art object' in recent years. It is argued that the meaning of cultural objects infused with the heritage and identity of 'global culture' has been developed substantially through the innovative approaches of university scholars, museum curators, and administrators since the latter part of the twentieth century. Through exploring the ways in which universities and their museums have overseen changes in the global context for art, this edited collection initiates a larger dialogue and inquiry into the value and contribution of the empirical model. The volume includes a full-colour photo essay by Marla C. Berns on the Fowler Museum's 'Fowler at Fifty' project, as well as contributions from Donald Preziosi, Catherine M. Cole, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Claire Farago, Selma Holo, and Gemma Rodrigues. It is important reading for professionals, scholars and advanced students alike.
The conservation of old Sanaa is a major cultural heritage initiative that began in the 1980's under the auspices of UNESCO; it continues today, led by local agencies and actors. In contrast to other parts of the world where conservation was introduced at a later date to remediate the effects of modernization, in Yemen the two processes have been more or less concurrent. This has resulted in a paradox: unlike many other countries in the Middle East that abandoned traditional construction practices long ago, in Yemen these practices have not died out. Builders and craftsmen still work in 'traditional' construction, and see themselves as caretakers of the old city. At the same time, social forms that shaped the built fabric persist in both the old city and the new districts. Yemenis, in effect, are not separated from their heritage by an historical divide. What does it mean to conserve in a place where the 'historic past' is, in some sense, still alive? How must international agencies and consultants readjust theory and practice as they interact with living representatives of this historic past? And what are the implications of the case of Sanaa for conservation in general? Building a World Heritage City addresses these questions and also fosters greater cultural understanding of a little known, but geopolitically important, part of the world that is often portrayed exclusively in terms of unrest and political turmoil.
The number of women working in museum settings has grown exponentially since the start of the twentieth century. Women in the Museum explores the professional lives of the sector's female workforce today and examines the challenges they face working in what was, until recently, a male-dominated field. Drawing on testimony gathered from surveys, focus groups, and interviews with female museum professionals, the book examines the nature of gender bias in the profession, as well as women's varied responses to it. In doing so, it clarifies how women's work in museums differs from men's and reveals the entrenched nature of gender bias in the museum workplace. Offering a clear argument as to why museums must create, foster, and protect an equitable playing field, the authors incorporate a gender equity agenda for individuals, institutions, graduate programs, and professional associations. Written by experienced museum professionals, Women in the Museum is the first book to examine the topic in depth. It is useful reading for students and academics in the fields of museum studies and gender studies, as well as museum professionals and gender equality advocates.
Today, death is being reconceptualised around the world as heritage, replete with material markers and intangible performances. These heritages of death are personal, national and international. They are vernacular as well as official, sanctioned as well as alternative. This book brings together more than twenty international scholars to consider the heritage of death from spatial, political, religious, economic, cultural, aesthetic and emotive aspects. It showcases different attitudes and phases of death and their relationship to heritage through ethnographically informed case studies to illustrate both general patterns and local and national variations. Through analyses of material expressions and social practices of grief, mourning and remembrance, this book shows not only what death means in contemporary societies, but also how individuals, groups and nations act towards death.
The urge for regional identity has not declined in the process of globalization. Rather, heritage is used to develop regional distinctiveness and to charge identities with a past. Particularly helpful for this aim are creation stories, Golden Ages or recent, shared traumas. Some themes such as the Roman era or the Second World War appear easier to appropriate than, for example, prehistory. This book assesses the role of heritage in the construction of regional identities in Western Europe. It contains case studies on early medieval heritage in Alsace and Euregio-Meuse Rhine, industrial heritage in the German Ruhr area and competing memories in the Arnhem-Nijmegen region in the Netherlands. It presents new insights into the process of heritage production on a regional level in relationship to processes of identity construction. The theoretical analysis of "heritage" and "regional identity" is innovative as these concepts were hardly analysed in relation to each other before. This book also offers insights into policy, tourism, spatial development and regional development to policymakers, politicians, designers and professionals in the heritage and tourism industries.
First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and Francis, an informa company.
Migration is, and has always been, a disruptive experience. Freedom from oppression and hope for a better life are counter-balanced by feelings of loss - loss of family members, of a home, of personal belongings. Memories of the migration process itself often fade quickly away in view of the new challenges that await immigrants in their new homelands. This volume asks, and shows, how migration memories have been kept, stored, forgotten, and indeed retrieved in many different archives, in official institutions, and in heritage centres, as well as in personal and family collections. Based on a variety of examples and conceptual approaches - from artistic approaches to the family archive via 'smell and memory as archives', to a cultural history of the suitcase - this volume offers a new and original way to write Jewish history and the history of Jewish migration in the context of personal and public memory. The documents reflect the transitory character of the migration experience, and they tell stories of longing and belonging. This book was originally published as a special issue of Jewish Culture and History.
Over the last twenty years the educational role of the museum has come to be central to its mission. There are now far more educational opportunities, new spaces, new interfaces - both digital and physical, and a growing number of education and interpretation departments, educational curators and public engagement programmes. Despite these developments, however, higher education has remained a marginal collaborator compared to primary and secondary schools and to other forms of adult learning. This has meant that the possibilities for partnerships between universities, colleges, museums and galleries has remained relatively unexplored, especially in relation to their potential for generating innovative patterns of research and learning. This book addresses the key issues which are preventing such partnerships and examines how to enable more effective and creative connections between museums and higher education. The authors identify conceptual and practical barriers and explore whether current academic models are fit for purpose. They argue that as pressures mount on public educational resources around the world, there needs to be an urgent increase in the exchange of knowledge across these sectors and the forging of world-class scholarly partnerships. Examples of research undertaken internationally offer best practice models for collaboration and integration. This book will be compulsory reading for museum and educational specialists and those interested in engaging in museum/higher education partnerships. It will also be of interest to those involved in policy and decision-making in education, the museum sector and national and local government.
Specialists in cultural policy draw on many scholarly literatures and traditions, including but not limited to, media and communication studies, history, sociology, politics, arts management, geography, and cultural studies. Now, this new four-volume collection from Routledge brings together the key texts that form the background, context, and basis for a sophisticated understanding of the topic, materials that have hitherto been scattered throughout a variety of specialist journals and books. Cultural Policy offers advanced students and established researchers alike a comprehensive and carefully ordered 'mini library' of the subject's major works.
Few perspectives have invigorated the development of critical museum studies over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as much as Foucault's account of the relations between knowledge and power and their role in processes of governing. Within this literature, Tony Bennett's work stands out as having marked a series of strategic engagements with Foucault's work to offer a critical genealogy of the public museum, offering an account of its nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century development that has been constantly alert to the politics of museums in the present. Museums, Power, Knowledge brings together new research with a set of essays initially published in diverse contexts, making available for the first time the full range of Bennett's critical museology. Ranging across natural history, anthropological art, geological and history museums and their precursors in earlier collecting institutions, and spanning the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries in discussing museum practices in Britain, Australia, the USA, France and Japan, it offers a compelling account of the shifting political logics of museums over the modern period. As a collection that aims to bring together the 'signature' work of a museum theorist and historian whose work has long occupied a distinctive place in museum/society debates, Museums, Power, Knowledge will be of interest to researchers, teachers and students working in the fields of museum and heritage studies, cultural history, cultural studies and sociology, as well as museum professionals and museum visitors.
This volume provides an unparalleled exploration of ethics and museum practice, considering the controversies and debates which surround key issues such as provenance, ownership, cultural identity, environmental sustainability and social engagement. Using a variety of case studies which reflect the internal realities and daily activities of museums as they address these issues, from exhibition content and museum research to education, accountability and new technologies, Museums, Ethics and Cultural Heritage enables a greater understanding of the role of museums as complex and multifaceted institutions of cultural production, identity-formation and heritage preservation. Benefitting from ICOM's unique position in the museum world, this collection brings a global range of academics and professionals together to examine museums ethics from multiple perspectives. Providing a more complete picture of the diverse activities now carried out by museums, Museums, Ethics and Cultural Heritage will appeal to practitioners, academics and students alike.
Based on original contributions by specialists, this manual covers both the theory and the practice required in the management of museums. It is intended for all museum and art gallery profession staff, and includes sections on new technology, marketing, volunteers and museum libraries.
Focusing on three secular institutional building types: libraries, museums, and cinemas, this book explores the intricate interplay between culture and architecture. It explores the cultural imperatives which have seen to the formation of these institutions, the development of their architecture, and their transformation over time. The relationship between culture and architecture is often perceived as a monologic relationship. Architecture is seen to embody, represent and/or reflect the values, the beliefs, and the aesthetic ideals of a culture. Ameri argues that this is at best a partial and restrictive view, and that if architecture is a cultural statement, it is a performative one. It does not merely represent culture, but constructs, reifies, and imposes culture as the unalterable shape of reality. Whereas the concept and the study of cultural performatives have had an important critical impact on the humanities, architecture as a cultural performative has not received the necessary scholarly attention and, in part, this book aims to fill this gap. Whereas building-type studies have been largely restricted to elucidating how best to design building-types based on historic and contemporary precedents, studies in the humanities that analytically and critically engage the secular institutions and their history as cultural performatives, typically cast a blind or perfunctory glance at the performative complicity of their architecture. This book aims to address the omissions in both these approaches. The library, the museum, and the movie-theater have been selected for close critical study because, this book argues, each has been instituted to house, 'domesticate,' and restrain a specific form of representation. The aim has been to protect and promulgate the metaphysics of presence as Jacques Derrida expounds the concept. This book proposes that it is against the dangers of unconstrained cohabitation of reality and representation that the library, the m
In October 1860, at the culmination of the Second Opium War, British and French troops looted and destroyed one of the most important palace complexes in imperial China-the Yuanmingyuan. Known in the West as the "Summer Palace," this site consisted of thousands of buildings housing a vast art collection. It is estimated that over a million objects may have been taken from the palaces in the Yuanmingyuan-and many of these are now scattered around the world, in private collections and public museums. With contributions from leading specialists, this is the first book to focus on the collecting and display of "Summer Palace" material over the past 150 years in museums in Britain and France. It examines the way museums placed their own cultural, political and aesthetic concerns upon Yuanmingyuan material, and how displays-especially those at the Royal Engineers Museum in Kent, the National Museum of Scotland and the Musee Chinois at the Chateau of Fontainebleau-tell us more about European representations and images of China, than they do about the Yuanmingyuan itself.
The Museums Association (the world's oldest professional museum organization) held an open discussion in its centenary year of 1989. They brought together some of the world's leading museum professionals, active politicians, economists and marketing specialists. This book has grown from those lively (sometimes heated) discussions. The "real" issues which the authors address move beyond the narrow issues of professional practice which dominate so many meetings, and into the much harder world of political, economic and cultural realities. And because the authors are drawn from the museum profession worldwide, the book is truly international, reflecting issues which really affect all museums. This book should be of interest to students of museum studies and museum professionals.
The Victorian era heralded an age of transformation in which momentous changes in the field of natural history coincided with the rise of new visual technologies. Concurrently, different parts of the British Empire began to more actively claim their right to being acknowledged as indispensable contributors to knowledge and the progress of empire. This book addresses the complex relationship between natural history and photography from the 1850s to the 1880s in Britain and its colonies: Australia, New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, India. Coinciding with the rise of the modern museum, photography's arrival was timely, and it rapidly became an essential technology for recording and publicising rare objects and valuable collections. Also during this period, the medium assumed a more significant role in the professional practices and reputations of naturalists than has been previously recognized, and it figured increasingly within the expanding specialized networks that were central to the production and dissemination of new knowledge. In an interrogation that ranges from the first forays into museum photography and early attempts to document collecting expeditions to the importance of traditional and photographic portraiture for the recognition of scientific discoveries, this book not only recasts the parameters of what we actually identify as natural history photography in the Victorian era but also how we understand the very structure of empire in relation to this genre at that time.
A searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to preserve the culture of "vanishing" Indigenous peoples through dispossession of the very communities it was meant to protect. In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other chroniclers began amassing Indigenous cultural objects-crafts, clothing, images, song recordings-by the millions. Convinced that Indigenous peoples were doomed to disappear, collectors donated these objects to museums and universities that would preserve and exhibit them. Samuel Redman dives into the archive to understand what the collectors deemed the tradition of the "vanishing Indian" and what we can learn from the complex legacy of salvage anthropology. The salvage catalog betrays a vision of Native cultures clouded by racist assumptions-a vision that had lasting consequences. The collecting practice became an engine of the American museum and significantly shaped public education and preservation, as well as popular ideas about Indigenous cultures. Prophets and Ghosts teases out the moral challenges inherent in the salvage project. Preservationists successfully maintained an important human inheritance, sometimes through collaboration with Indigenous people, but collectors' methods also included outright theft. The resulting portrait of Indigenous culture reinforced the public's confidence in the hierarchies of superiority and inferiority invented by "scientific" racism. Today the same salvaged objects are sources of invaluable knowledge for researchers and museum visitors. But the question of what should be done with such collections is nonetheless urgent. Redman interviews Indigenous artists and curators, who offer fresh perspectives on the history and impact of cultural salvage, pointing to new ideas on how we might contend with a challenging inheritance.
The Norfolk museum that would one day bear the Chrysler name was always a good museum of its kind, home to a respectable collection serving a smallish city. But when Norfolk native Jean Outland married Walter Chrysler, heir to the automobile manufacturing fortune and an avid art collector, the museum found a person with whom its fortunes would be intertwined, sometimes spectacularly, for decades to come. Walter had already established a Chrysler Museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts, but in 1971--in need of more space and, admittedly, a fresh start--he relocated the operation to Norfolk. The museum that had once fretted over the possible purchase of a minor Cezanne because it would by itself deplete the entire budget now found itself playing host almost overnight to works by the Old Masters as well as many of the most notable modern artists. Chrysler's was a world-class art collection, containing pieces by, among others, Fragonard, Ingres, Gericault, Tiffany, Matisse, and Braque. The groundwork was laid for Norfolk's place on the cultural map. In Legacy, Peggy Earle paints a vivid picture of this provincial museum's transformation into one of the finest art museums on the East Coast. She also delivers a captivating portrait of Walter Chrysler, a generous and demanding man who found in art patronage a focus not only for his wealth but also for his tremendous energy. Not content to merely admire the work, Walter had a naturally gregarious side and was apt to deal with artists such as Pablo Picasso directly. And yet he was also intensely private. Earle provides readers with a fascinating view of the politics of the museum world, where even good relationships are never uncomplicated. (The addition of the Chrysler collection's works to the museum was not unanimously applauded by the community; nor was it a foregone conclusion that, upon Chrysler's death, the pieces would even stay with the museum.) This lively account of the unlikely union between an arts maverick and a city on the cusp of cultural evolution sheds new light on how great art finds a place to call home.
Critical Practice: Artists, Museums, Ethics is an ambitious work that blurs the boundaries among art history, museum studies, political science and applied ethics. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to represent key developments in institutional critique as they impact museums." "The book elucidates the museological and ethical implications of institutional critique, providing a much needed resource for museum studies scholars, artists, museum professionals, art historians and graduate students worldwide who are interested in mapping and unpacking the intricate relationships among artists, museums and communities. It argues that institutional critique is, at heart, a museological enterprise committed to creating reconciliations between museums and their publics. The volume will show how artists are uniquely positioned as both museum insiders and outsiders to encourage reconciliation. " Critical Practice" demonstrates how and why museums are drawn to institutional critique as reconciliation at pivotal moments in institutional and social history. By analyzing an international group of case studies, charting their attempts at reconciling museums and communities, it identifies key issues that institutional critique interrogates. In so doing, the book illuminates both the collaborative and contentious possibilities of these projects. "Critical Practice" is the first book on institutional critique informed by current debates in museum ethics and brings together a diverse range of literature to make it an invaluable resource for students of Museum Studies and Art and Gallery Studies. |
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