The 1970s saw the emergence and subsequent proliferation across the Arabian Peninsula of 'national museums', institutions aimed at creating social cohesion and affiliation to the state within a disparate population. Representing the Nation examines the wide-ranging use of exhibitionary forms of national identity projection via consideration of their motivations, implications (current and future), possible historical backgrounds, official and unofficial meanings, and meanings for both the user/visitor and the multiple creators. The book responds to, due to the importance placed on tradition, heritage and national identity across all the states of the Peninsula, and the growth of re-imagined and new museums, the need for far greater discussion and research in these areas.

This book explores the organic lives of popular Sufi shrines in contemporary Northwest India. It traverses the worldview of shrine spaces, rituals and their complex narratives, and provides an insight into their urban and rural landscapes in the post-Partition (Indian) Punjab. What happened to these shrines when attempts were made to dissuade Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus from their veneration of popular saints in the early twentieth century? What was the fate of popular shrines that persisted even when the Muslim population was virtually wiped off as a result of migration during Partition? How did these shrines manifest in the context of the threat posed by militants in the 1980s? How did such popular practices reconfigure themselves when some important centres of Sufism were left behind in the West Punjab (now Pakistan)? This book examines several of these questions and utilizes a combination of analytical tools, new theoretical tropes and an ethnographic approach to understand and situate popular Sufi shrines so that they are both historicized and spatialized. As such, it lays out some crucial contours of the method and practice of understanding popular sacred spaces (within India and elsewhere), bridging the everyday and the metanarratives of power structures and state formation. This book will be useful to scholars, researchers and those engaged in interdisciplinary work in history, social anthropology, historical sociology, cultural studies, historical geography, religion and art history, as well as those interested in Sufism and its shrines in South Asia.

Early Modern Merchants as Collectors encourages the rethinking of collecting not as an elite, often aristocratic pursuit, but rather as a vital activity that has engaged many different groups within society. The essays included in this volume consider merchants not only as important collectors in their own right, as opposed to merely agents or middlemen, but also as innovators who determined taste. Through bringing together contributions on merchant collectors across a wide geographical spread, including England, The Netherlands, Venice, Moghul India, China and Japan, among other locations, it aims to challenge the often Eurocentric view of the study of collecting that has shaped the discipline to date. The early modern period and its Wunderkammern formed the subject of some of the earliest, foundational texts on collecting. This volume expands on such previous scholarship, taking a more in-depth look at a particular class of collectors and investigating their motivations, social and economic circumstances, and the intellectual ideas and purposes that informed their collecting. It offers a fresh approach to the understanding of the role of merchants in early modern societies and will serve as a resource to historians of art, science, museums, culture and economics, as well as to scholars of transcultural studies.

For volunteers or staff at small organizations, collections management can be a daunting task. Archives for the Lay Person is a guidebook for people who care for historical records, photographs, and collections but do not have the appropriate professional training. Lois Hamill provides practical, step-by-step guidance for managing all facets of archival collections, from acquisition, arrangement, and description to storage and security. The book also offers advice on how to utilize PastPerfect software for collections database management.

A Bible, an officer's mess kit, a cane arm chair and a blood-stained note... at first glance, these items might not seem to have much in common. But on closer examination they prove to be some of the most interesting artifacts from the Civil War. This volume searches out and details memorabilia in museums spread over 21 states and the District of Columbia. Beginning with an overview of the Civil War, the book provides a state-by-state guide to various museums and historical societies with particular focus on matchless Civil War objects in their collections. Chapters provide the description of each museum and details on how each artifact came to be in that location. A chronological narrative centering on each rare item is then provided, placing the object within the timeline of the war and linking it to a specific event. An appendix contains a guide to battles which are known by various names.

Historicising Heritage and Emotions examines how heritage is connected to and between people and places through emotion, both in the past and today. Discussion is focused on the overlapping categories of blood (families and bloodlines), stone (monuments and memorials) and land (landscape and places imbued with memories), with the contributing authors exploring the ways in which emotions invest heritage with affective power, and the transformative effects of this power in individual, community and cultural contexts. The 13 chapters that make up the volume take examples from the premodern and modern eras, and from two connected geographical regions, the United Kingdom, and Australia and the Pacific. Each chapter seeks to identify, historicise and contextualise the processes of heritage and the emotional regimes at play, locating the processes within longer historical and transnational genealogies and critically appraising them as part of broader cultural currents. Theoretically grounded in new approaches to the history of emotions and critical heritage studies, the analysis challenges the traditional scholarly focus on heritage in its modern forms, offering multifaceted premodern and modern case studies that demonstrate heritage and emotion to have complex and vibrant histories. Offering transhistorical and multidisciplinary discussion around the ways in which we can talk about, discuss, categorise and theorise heritage and emotion in different historical contexts, Historicising Heritage and Emotions is a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in heritage, emotions and history.

First published in 2004, this volume recognises that there is much more to museums than the documenting, monumentalizing, or theme-parking of identity, history and heritage. This landmark anthology aims to make strange the very existence of museums and to plot a critical, historical and ethical understanding of their origins and history. A radical selection of key texts introduces the reader to the intense investigation of the modern European idea of the museum that has taken place over the last fifty years. Texts first published in journals and books are brought together in one volume with up-to-the-minute and specially commissioned pieces by leading administrators, curators and art historians. The selections are organized by key themes that map the evolution of the debate and introduced by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, two considerable critics, who write with the edge and enthusiasm of art historians who have spent their lives working with museums. Grasping the World is an invaluable resource for students and teachers of art history and museum studies.

Museum Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship makes a contribution towards building a museum perspective of innovation that takes into consideration the unique role of museums in society. Beginning and ending with the idea of museum innovation in a wider sense, the book takes digital innovation as a particular focus. Drawing on innovation theories from business studies and case studies from national museums in the US and the UK, as well as numerous examples of innovative museum projects around the globe, the author unpacks, in practical terms, what it means for museums to be innovative and socially enterprising. As a result, Eid presents a research-based model of innovation in museums, which is flexible enough to be fully or partially adopted by any museum, regardless of size, location, mission or nature of the collections it houses. As such, this model makes innovation in museums scalable, replicable and feasible to start and operate. Supplying the museum studies field with essential terminologies and conceptual frameworks related to innovation, Museum Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship helps to forge new ideas and create common ground with other disciplines. Therefore, the book should be essential reading for academics, researchers and graduate students working in the fields of museum and heritage studies, digital humanities and business studies. It should also be of great interest to practitioners working in museums around the globe.

Fluid preservation refers to specimens and objects that are preserved in fluids, most commonly alcohol and formaldehyde, but also glycerin, mineral oil, acids, glycols, and a host of other chemicals that protect the specimen from deterioration. Some of the oldest natural history specimens in the world are preserved in fluid. Despite the fact that fluid preservation has been practiced for more than 350 years, this is the only handbook that summarize all that is known about this complex and often confusing topic. Fluid Preservation: A Comprehensive Reference covers the history and techniques of fluid preservation and how to care for fluid preserved specimens in collections. *More than 900 references on fluid preservation were reviewed for this project. *An historical survey of preservative recipes provides for guidance for museums with older collections (many fluid preservatives contain hazardous chemicals). *Current standards and best practices for collection care and management are presented. *Current and controversial topics (e.g., the preservation of DNA, alternatives to alcohol and formaldehyde) are discussed and fully referenced. *Health and safety issues involved with caring for fluid preserved collections are discussed. *The final chapter addresses fluid preserved specimens as cultural products and their use in art, literature, film, and song. Although most fluid-preserved specimens are found in natural history and medical museums, it is not at all uncommon to find them in art museums, history museums, and science centers. In addition to animals, plants, and anatomical specimens, fluid preserved collections include some minerals and fossils and many other objects. Fluid Preservation is an essential reference for: *Natural history curators *Natural history collections managers *Conservators *Medical and anatomical museum collections managers and curators *Art and history museum staff who have fluid preserved specimens and objects in their care (e.g., works by Damien Hirst) *Private collectors *Researchers using museum collections as sources of DNA, isotopes, etc. *Health and safety professionals *Exhibit planners and designers *Museum facilities planners and managers *People interested in the history of science *People interested in the history of natural history museums *Museum studies students

First published in 1987, The Heritage Industry sets out to protect the present and the future of life in Britain from their most dangerous enemy: a creeping takeover by the past. The author sets today's obsession with yesterday in the context of a climate of social and political decline. The economic uncertainties and cultural convulsions of post-war life have made the past seem a pleasanter and safer place. But how true is that image of the past, and whose past is it, anyway? Hewison questions the way institutions like the National Trust are helping to create a past that never was. While the real economy crumbles, a new force is taking over: the Heritage Industry, a movement dedicated to turning the British Isles into one vast open-air museum. This book will be of interest to students of history, art and cultural studies.

Examining the artistic, intellectual, and social life of performance, this book interrogates Theatre and Performance Studies through the lens of display and modern visual art. Moving beyond the exhibition of immaterial art and its documents, as well as re-enactment in gallery contexts, Guy's book articulates an emerging field of arts practice distinct from but related to increasing curatorial provision for 'live' performance. Drawing on a recent proliferation of object-centric events of display that interconnect with theatre, the book approaches artworks in terms of their curation together and re-theorizes the exhibition as a dynamic context in which established traditions of display and performance interact. By examining the current traffic of ideas and aesthetics moving between theatricality and curatorial practice, the study reveals how the reception of a specific form is often mediated via the ontological expectations of another. It asks how contemporary visual arts and exhibition practices display performance and what it means to generalize the 'theatrical' as the optic or directive of a curatorial concept. Proposing a symbiotic relation between theatricality and display, Guy presents cases from international arts institutions which are both displayed and performed, including Tate Modern and the Guggenheim, and assesses their significance to the enduring relation between theatre and the visual arts. The book progresses from the conventional alignment of theatricality and ephemerality within performance research and teases out a new temporality for performance with which contemporary exhibitions implicitly experiment, thereby identifying supplementary modes of performance which other discourses exclude. This important study joins the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies with exciting new directions in curation, aesthetics, sociology of the arts, visual arts, the creative industries, the digital humanities, cultural heritage, and reception and audience theories.

Cultural policy intersects with political, economic, and socio-cultural dynamics at all levels of society, placing high and often contradictory expectations on the capabilities and capacities of the media, the fine, performing, and folk arts, and cultural heritage. These expectations are articulated, mobilised and contested at - and across - a global scale. As a result, the study of cultural policy has firmly established itself as a field that cuts across a range of academic disciplines, including sociology, cultural and media studies, economics, anthropology, area studies, languages, geography, and law. This Routledge Handbook of Global Cultural Policy sets out to broaden the field's consideration to recognise the necessity for international and global perspectives. The book explores how cultural policy has become a global phenomenon. It brings together a diverse range of researchers whose work reveals how cultural policy expresses and realises common global concerns, dominant narratives, and geopolitical economic and social inequalities. The sections of the book address cultural policy's relation to core academic disciplines and core questions, of regulations, rights, development, practice, and global issues. With a cross-section of country-by-country case studies, this comprehensive volume is a map for academics and students seeking to become more globally orientated cultural policy scholars.

This handbook is the most comprehensive, up-to-date source of information on the history of wood conservation, on the structure and properties of wood, on organisms causing deterioration, on methods of diagnosis of wood condition, on materials and methods of wood preservation, on consolidation of deteriorated wood, and on wood adhesives. Although it provides many techniques of wood conservation in detail, it goes far beyond the scope of a "recipe book" by giving an overview of the use of particular materials and methods as they apply to dry as well as wet or waterlogged wood. Access to the enormous wealth of information is facilitated by separate indexes for trade names, pests, and conservation materials. The latter, together with their methods of application, were gathered from the literature and organized chronologically. For liquid preservatives, fumigants, and consolidants, these listings are preceded by important data on each of the materials.

Heritage and its preservation is a major concern around the world. In order to establish identities, as well as attracting visitors, the natural and cultural heritage is protected, conserved, managed and interpreted, by families, by cities, by nation states and at international level. Environmental and cultural heritage is now accepted as a major feature in business location, as the demand for quality of life becomes insistent.This major movement has resulted in the development of Heritage as a field of study, both on its own, and as elements within many other disciplines, such as geography, art history, archaeology, ecology and tourism management. While the techniques of conservation remains within specialist disciplines, Peter Howard offers a textbook for students approaching heritage as a combined field of study for the first time. The fields of heritage under review range from the nature trail to the cathedral, and from the family album to the national park, viewed at a variety of levels, including family and local heritage as well as the national and international dimensions. Heritage is seen as a demand led activity, with interested stakeholders being academics, governments, owners, school-children, pilgrims and the media as well as the ubiquitous tourist. There is a process by which some things are selected as heritage, but others are ignored, and it is the practical management of this process which is the focus to which the text constantly returns.

Amiria Henare explores the role of material cultural research in anthropology and related disciplines from the late eighteenth century to the present. Grounded in a historical ethnography of museums in New Zealand and Scotland, the work traces the movement of artefacts now held in contemporary collections through space and time, demonstrating how and why things were bought, exchanged and stolen and carried across oceans to arrive in present-day museums. The collecting of artefacts and their study both in museums and the the field are emphasised as key strategies in the development of anthropological thought, While much late twentieth-century writing in anthropology has employed analytic models and methodologies derived from the study of language, this work belongs to a growing body of research drawing on the epistemological potency of artefacts, the distinctive insights afforded by engagement with material things.

Fostering Empathy through Museums features fifteen case studies with clear take-away ideas, and lessons learned by vividly illustrating a spectrum of approaches in the way museums are currently employing empathy, a critical skill that is relevant to personal, institutional, economical, and societal progress. The need is rapidly growing for empathy to serve as a lens through which we find our purpose and connection in a complex world. This demand brings with it an appetite to cultivate it through safe and trusted platforms. Museums are uniquely equipped to undertake this important mission. This book will help museum staff and leadership at all levels working at a variety of museums (from animal sanctuaries to art museums, from historic house museums to children's and science museums) to better understand the multitude of ways how empathy can be cultivated, and employed in museum setting. Fostering Empathy through Museums will provide inspiration, examples, and lessons learned from a balanced spectrum of museums currently employing empathy in museum setting: as an educational tool to better connect their content with the audience, as an integral element of a museum's institutional values and behavior, and as a phenomenon that is worthy of exploration on its own and as an intentional outcome. This publication provides museum professionals as well as formal and informal learning educators to receive an overview of the variety of approaches to empathy in museums, and to create a shared language and methodologies that could enable them to utilize and nurture empathy as a "shared vision" that would serve not only their organizational mission, but also the greater good. Empathy can be a tool, or an intentional outcome depending on the institution's objectives. Regardless of the choice, the ideas presented in this book are intended to inform and inspire institutions to unlock exciting possibilities in the areas of improved visitor experience, creative community partnerships, and contribution to social progress by bringing empathy to public discourse through institutional strategies, exhibitions, experiences, and programs. The book also provides ideas for future strategies where empathy is considered as a "shared vision" by museums, and a product of a museum experience that might lead to positive social impact.

Vast sums of money spent to design, construct, and maintain museum additions demand great accountability of museum leaders and design professionals towards visitors and employees. Museum visitors today come not only to view works of art, but also to experience museum architecture itself, resulting in most major cities competing to build new museum additions or new museum buildings to become world class tourist destinations. Shedding New Light on Art Museum Additions presents post-occupancy evaluations of four high-profile museums and their additions in the United States and helps museum stakeholders understand their successes, shortcomings, and how their designs affect both visitors and employees who use them every day. The book helps decision-makers assess the short-term and long-term impacts of future proposals for new museum additions and illuminates the critical importance of investing in employee work environments, and giving serious consideration to lighting, wayfinding, accessibility, and the effects of museum fatigue that arise from the lack of public amenities. Museum leaders, curators, architects, designers, consultants, patrons of the arts and museum visitors will find this book to be a useful resource when planning and evaluating new building additions.

In recent years, the museum and gallery have increasingly become self-reflexive spaces, in which the relationship between art, its display, its creators and its audience is subverted and democratised. One effect of this has been a growing place for artists as curators, and in The Artist as Curator Celina Jeffery brings together a group of scholars and artists to explore the many ways that artists have introduced new curatorial ways of thinking and talking about artistic culture. Taking a deliberately multidisciplinary and cross-cultural focus, The Artist as Curator will fill a gap in museum and curatorial studies, offering a thorough and diverse treatment of various approaches to the historical and changing role of the artist as curator that should appeal to scholars, curators and artists alike.

Bonnie Sachatello-Sawyer and her co-authors have taken an important study and turned it into an intriguing, readable, and practical book. Adult learners provide a unique opportunity for museum educators. But what are adult learners looking for? What motivates them to take a class or attend a museum-sponsored activity? What do planners and instructors need to know to maximize the experience for participants? The authors analyzed a wide variety of programs from the perspective of planners, instructors, and participants. They discovered what works and what doesn't, and they've distilled this knowledge into twelve basic steps you can use to design truly meaningful experiences for your museum's adult programs. Visit the authors' web page

Considerations of the effect of trauma on heritage sites. The essays in this volume address the displacement of natural and cultural heritage caused by disasters, whether they be dramatic natural impacts or terrible events unleashed by humankind, including holocaust and genocide. Disasters can be natural or human-made, rapid or slow, great or small, yet the impact is effectively the same; nature, people and cultural heritage are displaced or lost. Yet while heritage and place are at risk from disasters, in time,sites of suffering are sometimes reframed as sites of memory; through this different lens these "difficult" places become heritage sites that attract tourists. Ranging widely chronologically and geographically, the contributors explore the impact of disasters, trauma and suffering on heritage and sense of place, in both theory and practice. Contributors: Kai Erikson, Catherine Roberts, Philip R. Stone, Stephen Miles, Susannah Eckersley, Gerard Corsane, Graeme Were, Jo Besley, Tim Padley, Chia-Li Chen, Jonathan Skinner, Diana Walters, Shalini Sharma, Ellie Land, Rob Morley, Ian Convery, John Welshman, Aron Mazel, Andrew Law, Bryony Onciul, Sarah Elliott, Rebecca Whittle,Will Medd, Maggie Mort, Hugh Deeming, Marion Walker, Clare Twigger-Ross, Gordon Walker, Nigel Watson, Richard Johnson, Esther Edwards, James Gardner, Brij Mohan, Josephine Baxter, Takashi Harada, Arthur McIvor, Rupert Ashmore, Peter Lurz, Marc Ancrenaz, Isabelle Lackman, OEzgun Emre Can, Bryndis Snaebjoernsdottir, Mark Wilson, Pat Caplan, Billy Sinclar, Phil O'Keefe

Bringing together scholars and practitioners from North America, Europe, Russia, and Australia, this pioneering volume provides a global survey of how museums address religion and charts a course for future research and interpretation. Contributors from a variety of disciplines and institutions explore the work of museums from many perspectives, including cultural studies, religious studies, and visual and material culture. Most museums throughout the world - whether art, archaeology, anthropology or history museums - include religious objects, and an increasing number are beginning to address religion as a major category of human identity. With rising museum attendance and the increasingly complex role of religion in social and geopolitical realities, this work of stewardship and interpretation is urgent and important. Religion in Museums is divided into six sections: museum buildings, reception, objects, collecting and research, interpretation of objects and exhibitions, and the representation of religion in different types of museums. Topics covered include repatriation, conservation, architectural design, exhibition, heritage, missionary collections, curation, collections and display, and the visitor's experience. Case studies provide comprehensive coverage and range from museums devoted specifically to the diversity of religious traditions, such as the State Museum of the History of Religion in St Petersburg, to exhibitions centered on religion at secular museums, such as Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, at the British Museum.

The creative and cultural industries are a dynamic and rapidly expanding field of enterprise. Yet all too often the dominant narrative about arts organisations is one of crisis, collapse, and closure. This edited collection seeks to challenge that narrative through pursuing a focus on organisational success in the management of creative and cultural organisations. This book offers a robust and in-depth analysis of nine international case studies exploring how different organisations have achieved their objectives through effectively managing their resources. Spanning a broad cross section of the cultural sector including Theatres; Multi-Arts Venues; Performing Arts Companies; Museums and Galleries; and Festivals and Events, these cases highlight the importance of examining an individual organisation's success in relation to its environmental context, revealing not only how arts organisations work in practice, but also providing inspiration and encouragement for those wishing to emulate such success. With an explicit focus on examining theory in practice, this unique collection will be of great interest to students, academics, and practitioners alike. While traditional approaches have often been overly theoretical, this pragmatic approach will help students to gain a richer understanding of how to manage cultural and creative organisations more effectively.

Traditionally, city museums have been keepers of city history. Many have been exercises in nostalgia, reflecting city pride. However, a new generation of museums focuses increasingly on the city's present and future as well as its past, and on the city in all of its diversity, challenges, and possibilities. Above all, these museums are gateways to understanding the city-our greatest and most complex creation and the place where half the world's population now lives. In this book, experts in the field explore this 'new' city museum and the challenge of contributing positively to city development.

This reader brings together 35 seminal articles that reflect the museum world's ongoing conversation with itself and the public about what it means to be a museum-one that is relevant and responsive to its constituents and always examining and reexamining its operations, policies, collections, and programs. In conjunction with the editor's introductory material and recommended additional readings these articles will help students grasp the essentials of the dialogue and guide them on where to turn for further details and developments.

Human-Centered Built Environment Heritage Preservation addresses the question of how a human-centred conservation approach can and should change practice. For the most part, there are few answers to this question because professionals in the heritage conservation field do not use social science research methodologies to manage cultural landscapes, assess historical significance and inform the treatment of building and landscape fabric. With few exceptions, only academic theorists have explored these topics while failing to offer specific, usable guidance on how the social sciences can actually be used by heritage professionals. In exploring the nature of a human-centred heritage conservation practice, we explicitly seek a middle ground between the academy and practice, theory and application, fabric and meanings, conventional and civil experts, and orthodox and heterodox ideas behind practice and research. We do this by positioning this book in a transdisciplinary space between these dichotomies as a way to give voice (and respect) to multiple perspectives without losing sight of our goal that heritage conservation practice should, fundamentally, benefit all people. We believe that this approach is essential for creating an emancipated built heritage conservation practice that must successfully engage very different ontological and epistemological perspectives.