MUSEUM THEORY EDITED BY ANDREA WITCOMB AND KYLIE MESSAGE
Museum Theory offers critical perspectives drawn from a broad range of disciplinary and intellectual traditions. This volume describes and challenges previous ways of understanding museums and their relationship to society. Essays written by scholars from museology and other disciplines address theoretical reflexivity in the museum, exploring the contextual, theoretical, and pragmatic ways museums work, are understood, and are experienced.
Organized around three themes - Thinking about Museums, Disciplines and Politics, and Theory from Practice/Practicing Theory - the text includes discussion and analysis of different kinds of museums from various, primarily contemporary, national and local contexts. Essays consider subjects including the nature of museums as institutions and their role in the public sphere, cutting-edge museum practice and their connections with current global concerns, and the links between museum studies and disciplines such as cultural studies, anthropology, and history.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Editors xiii
General Editors xiv
Contributors xv
Acknowledgments xvii
Editors’ Preface to Museum Theory and the International Handbooks of Museum Studies xix
Introduction - Museum Theory: An Expanded Field xxvii
Andrea Witcomb and Kylie Message
Part I Thinking about Museums 1
1. Thinking (with) Museums: From Exhibitionary Complex to Governmental Assemblage 3
Tony Bennett
2. Foucault and the Museum 21
Kevin Hetherington
3. What, or Where, Is the (Museum) Object?: Colonial Encounters in Displayed Worlds of Things 41
Sandra H. Dudley
4. Anarchical Artifacts: Museums as Sites for Radical Otherness 63
Janice Baker
5. (Post‐) Cartographic Urges: The Intersection of Museums and Tourism 79
Russell Staiff
6. Museums, Human Rights, and Universalism Reconsidered 93
Jennifer Barrett
7. The Democratic Horizons of the Museum: Citizenship and Culture 117
Peter Dahlgren and Joke Hermes
8. Museums, Ecology, Citizenship 139
Toby Miller
Part II Disciplines and Politics 157
9. Reflexive Museology: Lost and Found 159
Shelley Ruth Butler
10. The Art of Anthropology: Questioning Contemporary Art in Ethnographic Display 183
Haidy Geismar
11. Change and Continuity: Art Museums and the Reproduction of Art‐Museumness 211
Ien Ang
12. Cool Art on Display: The Saatchi Phenomenon 233
Jim McGuigan
13. Contentious Politics and Museums as Contact Zones 253
Kylie Message
14. Emotions in the History Museum 283
Sheila Watson
15. The Presence of the Past: Imagination and Affect in the Museu do Oriente, Portugal 303
Elsa Peralta
16. Toward a Pedagogy of Feeling: Understanding How Museums Create a Space for Cross‐Cultural Encounters 321
Andrea Witcomb
17. The Liquid Museum: New Institutional Ontologies for a Complex, Uncertain World 345
Fiona Cameron
Part III Theory from Practice/Practicing Theory 363
18. The Displaced Local: Multiple Agency in the Building of Museums’ Ethnographic Collections 365
Howard Morphy
19. The World as Collected; or, Museum Collections as Situated Materialities 389
Fredrik Svanberg
20. Ambient Aesthetics: Altered Subjectivities in the New Museum 417
Natalia Radywyl, Amelia Barikin, Nikos Papastergiadis, and Scott McQuire
21. Museum Encounters and Narrative Engagements 437
Philipp Schorch
22. Theorizing Museum and Heritage Visiting 459
Laurajane Smith
23. The Museum in Hiding: Framing Conflict 485
Amelia Barikin, Lyndell Brown, and Charles Green
24. Preserving/Shaping/Creating: Museums and Public Memory in a Time of Loss 511
James B. Gardner
25. Sites of Trauma: Contemporary Collecting and Natural Disaster 531
Liza Dale‐Hallett, Rebecca Carland, and Peg Fraser
Index 553
